“Blogi z pierwszego tłoczenia” (the “Blogs from the First Press”) website, belonging to the Kujawski brand, collects the best cooking recipes from selected blogs run by cooking enthusiasts in a single place.
We built the website from the ground up in 2008 and were responsible for its maintenance and development for 16 years.
“Blogs from the First Press” – statistics:
192
collaborating bloggers
42 000
recipes
120 000
cooking-themed
photographs
Efficient website engine
The heart of every website is its engine. To meet the requirements of the “Blogi z pierwszego tłoczenia” website, we built an engine in PHP with the use of the Model-View-Controller (MVC) structure. Recipe data is stored in a MySQL database.
Over the years the website has undergone numerous changes, including two thorough overhauls. Currently, thanks to its modular design, it is easy to introduce new functions to the website, and conduct experiments.
To improve the performance of the website and ensure its fast operation, we have implemented cache mechanisms and optimisation techniques for frequently performed operations. The smooth operation of the website is also facilitated by the use of an efficient HTTP server – nginx.
Automatic content collection
“Blogi z pierwszego tłoczenia” is a huge recipe collection that grew by several or even a dozen new entries every day during the peak of the website’s popularity. More than 42,000 recipes have been entered into the database throughout the website’s existence.
To keep up with the creativity of affiliated bloggers and be able to constantly add their newest recipes, we created tools for the automatic collection and processing of blog content using Perl – a language known for its ability to process text data.
Fast search engine
A site containing as much content as “Blogi z pierwszego tłoczenia” simply cannot function without an efficient search engine.
The engine we implemented is based on the tried-and-tested Apache Solr engine, which ensures accurate and fast search results. Searching through the entire recipe database takes merely 0.3 seconds.
Reliable e-mail service
A large portion of the website’s users wanted to regularly receive new recipes in their inbox and subscribed to the “Culinary Courier” bulletin.
To ensure efficient and trouble-free delivery of a large number of messages to various users, we integrated the website with the SendGrid service – one of the most popular mass mailing solutions.
