When I had bought the domain for Wikipes.com, I was really excited and felt it was a really good idea. The name fitted well, the idea of an open-source recipe database is natural, and the design I had pictured in my head was just right. As I was putting the site together, my excitement grew to nervousness. What if it didn’t take off? What if people couldn’t grasp the concept? What if it wasn’t easy enough to enjoy?

These questions helped form Wikipes into what it is now, a completed project where a lot of thoughts and effort was made to ensure it was easy to use, enjoyable, and is nice to look at.

To be quite frank, I’m surprised at how fast the site is spreading. A link on Metafilter is the extent of any kind of promotion that took place. A mistake was made at first, where Erik had posted the link on Metafilter, shortly before discovering that this kind of linking is frowned upon, as he was involved with the project because he helped give me advice and created the logo for the site. If he had known before he posted, it never would’ve happened. However, Wikipes was popular enough for someone else to post a second link on Metafilter, someone certainly not involved with the project (although he may have posted a recipe, would that be involved?)

Besides that, Wikipes has been spread via word-of-mouth on the internet, with countless blogs and news sites talking about it. Some examples are MSNBC.com, at the top of del.icio.us popular for a while, listed on Ron Gilbert’s Grumpy Gamer, and Forever Geek to name a few. The nervousness is gone now, replaced again by excitement about the future of Wikipes.