This Christmas I created a fun tool that integrates with Pinterest.
Users are encouraged to connect with Pinterest, the tool then tries to match the users’ pins to recipes.
Pinterest API
The Pinterest API is relatively new and this is one of the first large projects to be invited to make use of it. It’s a great way of engaging users and encouraging them to discover recipes in a new way.
Recipe matching
The primary way of matching pins is by looking for keywords in the meta data attached to each pin.
The tool also looks at the dominant colour in the Pin and attempts to find a recipe with a similar colour palette. This is accomplished by making a statistical analysis of the image histogram and feeding this data in to the Solr search index and then searching over a range of similar colours.
Javascript UI
The whole interface is a single-page app powered by custom javascript that I built specifically to for this purpose.
Snow
…and did I mention there is snow? It wouldn’t be a Christmas hub without some animated snow!
