Greetings fellow Kitchen Monkis!

As most of you are well aware, Kitchen Monki offers two ways of accessing the Ultimate Cooking Utensil: Facebook Connect, or a native Kitchen Monki login. Facebook’s own rapid growth makes them a moving target, sometimes causing us to scramble when they make changes to their software.

Our software development Monkis have been hard at work trying to smooth out the Facebook kinks while implementing some newer features in order to communicate better with our users. The next time you log in with Facebook connect, you’ll be asked for your email address. Spam Monki? Never heard of him! We’ll never share your address, and you’ll be able to opt out of regular Monki communications. It will be easier, though, for us to communicate with those users who generously share their feedback. Thanks for your continued support.

Sam Kinney
Top Banana

Welcome to the new Kitchen Monki, Your Ultimate Cooking Utensil. Today’s a big day for Kitchen Monki. We’ve taken the “beta” designation off the site. We’ve rolled out a new look for the page headers and footers. And we’ve adopted a new moniker: Your Ultimate Cooking Utensil.

Kitchen Monki is no ordinary recipe warehouse like those found so many other places on the Internet. We’re the place you can manage your everyday cooking affairs. That’s why you see so much functionality on every page, for managing your recipe queue, creating shopping lists, and searching for recipes in every possible way. For those of us who use the site every day, it really is our Ultimate Cooking Utensil, saving us time and raising our game. Join us and make it your Ultimate Cooking Utensil too.

We hope you like the new look. You’ll find some sections of the site evolve to incorporate more of that look. Your feedback and the site’s growth have helped us hone in on a look that’s fun and effective at the same time.

While we’ve dropped the “beta” designation, please feel free to keep the suggestions and bug reports coming.

Thanks for your support.

Sam Kinney
The Top Banana

As we ring in 2010, we want to start off by thanking all the Kitchen Monki users who have made the site what it is today. Whether it be contributing recipes, bug reports, or simply sharing their experiences with the site on their blogs, twitter, or facebook, this past year’s evolution of the Monki could not happen without you.

That’s why we are very excited about what the new year has in store. Based on the plethora of enhancement requests and suggestions, Kitchen Monki’s momentum continues to build and we look forward to even more cool and innovative features that we know users are going to go bananas over.

Thanks once again and we hope you continue to Plan, Shop, and Share with us in the New Year!

Cheers,

Kitchen Monki

As we head into the Thanksgiving weekend, we hope everybody is ready to put Kitchen Monki to work. We all plan to, on this favorite holiday weekend so devoted to food and family.

We wanted to give you an update on where we’re focusing our efforts. You’ll soon see a release of an updated “settings” page where you control your profile and Facebook integration. We’ve gotten a lot of feedback about little bugs around settings, and we’ve taken the opportunity to make a total overhaul of that feature.

When building a business like this, I like to think about the analogy of sailing. To sail upwind, you first tack in one direction, then back in another direction. We’ve spent a lot of effort lately tacking in the direction of “features” like the improved calendar, the toolbar, and the settings. We have a long list of further enhancements on our plate.

Because we like the vibe and activity that’s developed on the site, we are about to switch tacks and start working on user acquisition. You’ll see some of this, as new feature releases will be oriented towards attracting more users. Some of it you won’t see, as we pursue other activities “off the site” to promote what we’ve built.

As usual, we’ll work to be responsive on bugs and small tweaks. We welcome our users’ thoughts on ways we can promote the site.

Thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving.

Sam Kinney
CEO and Top Banana
KitchenMonki.com

We’ve very excited today to release another great feature that’s been cooking up in our development shop. A number of you wrote to request that we place a “Manage Queue” button in a few other places around the site. We, too, found ourselves wanting to access our recipe queue from many different pages. We also wanted to access our shopping list to add an item that just popped into our head, and we realized that new messages from other users often went unnoticed.

Today, you’ll find all those issues fixed in grand style, with a toolbar at the bottom of every page on the site. No matter what page you’re on, a look at the lower left hand corner of the page will give you quick access to your Queue, your Friends, your Bookmarks, and your Grocery List. Click on each of these, and a list will pop up. Click on any list item, and you’ll get a set of action buttons relevant to your choice. You can add and remove recipes from your Queue right here. You can add items to your grocery list. You can find a friend and link to his or her recipes or profile.

We already know this toolbar will make the site even more powerful to use, because we’ve been looking forward to it ourselves.

Thanks to all our users for the continued feedback and great new recipes. We have a pantry full of new ideas for the site, and continue to iron out bugs and periodic other challenges. Stay tuned.

Sam Kinney
Top Banana and CEO
Kitchen Monki

KitchenMonki once again goes where no other recipe sharing website has gone before by introducing Recipe Syndication. Now, you can Embed your KitchenMonki recipe in your blog/webpage just like YouTube does with videos. In addition, the Embed feature allows you to customize the look and feel of your recipe all with the click of your mouse so that it works best with the design and color scheme of your page.

Kitchen Monki’s user friendly meal planner allows you to take control of what your family is eating day in and day out, week in and week out, through simple click, drag, and drop functionality. In addition, if you need a hard copy of the meal plan as well as the recipes in the plan, Kitchen Monki’s all-inclusive print-outs (including Shopping List) will let you stick the plan on the fridge so everyone can see when and what’s cooking!

Today we’re happy to unveil a completely redesigned meal planning calendar tool. After we got our recent publicity, we received a steady stream of bug reports and enhancement requests about the calendar feature. We were glad users took that functionality seriously, because we already had a new design underway to improve usability. We think you’ll like the new version.

We have included some important changes to the new version:
1) We have switched to a one-day-at-a-time format with a small calendar to navigate days. This make better use of screen space.
2) We allow the same dish to be added to the calendar multiple times, and each instance can be scaled to a different number of users. This might be common for something like a breakfast item, but also makes the planner useful for food service operations.
3) We have included a better printed reporting package. If you wish, you can print a whole packet that includes the calendar, shopping list, and recipes for a date range.
4) We have retained the drag-and-drop metaphor. You can drag an item from your queue to the date and meal of your choice.

We hope you like the new calendar as much as we do. Thanks to everybody for the continued flow of great recipes.

Sam Kinney
Top Banana and CEO
KitchenMonki.com

It’s been a very exciting few weeks around the Kitchen Monki office. In short order, we got some great media exposure while we were continuing to tweak our beta web site. In its small way, our user base “exploded” and we got to learn a ton about what users value about the site.

First, thanks to all the new users who have already jumped in with a ton of new recipes. As we’ve always said, Kitchen Monki was going to raise our cooking game, and that has proven true as we try new recipes and learn new types of cuisine. Thanks also for the direct feedback we’ve gotten on bug/enhancement reports.

Concurrent with this post, you’ll see two new pages. The page users see when they log in (which we call the “Dashboard”) has been redesigned. We learned that during a time when recipes were being added rapidly, that the “Latest Recipes” listing of 10 recent recipes aged very quickly. A user that hadn’t been the site in a couple days would miss a lot of activity. And let’s face it; the flow of new recipes is entertaining. So the new Dashboard makes it easier to see all the recipes that popped up over the last day, day before, and longer.

Also on that page, you’ll note that we’ve added some statistics about recipe views and added a way to indicate that “I Like” the recipe. Comments and ratings naturally follow after you’ve cooked a recipe, so we wanted to add something spontaneous for users to appreciate a newly added dish.

Second, we’re releasing a new home page for users that aren’t logged in. For most of you members, you never spend any time on this page, connecting and proceeding to the Dashboard. We think the new home page for “non-logged-in” users catches up to the design themes on the main site.

We continue to work on some sections of the site, including those that got some pointed feedback. We’ve got work underway on the meal calendar and the community/profile pages. Stay tuned.

Sam Kinney
CEO and Top Banana
KitchenMonki.com

It’s been an exciting week around Kitchen Monki after one of our videos landed on Lifehacker. This was our first real publicity, and quite a surprise to us when it hit. While we’ve been in beta, we’d usually experience a handful of new users per day as we continued refining and developing new features. Starting at noon on Tuesday, however, we were getting about a hundred new users per hour. Thankfully, the site performed great.

We’re thrilled with all the new recipes too. When we started Kitchen Monki, one of our objectives was that we could raise our cooking game by interacting with other foodies. I know my game is raised. We also love stories like the one where a member’s 10-year-old son joined, found a Chicken Parmesan recipe, and cooked for his family.

We’ve gotten some great feedback and raced to fix a few bugs. Thanks to everybody who pushed on all areas of the site, including some we haven’t focused on in a while. We’ll continue to work on fixes and enhancements. Feel free to reach out to us through Twitter or the bug reports.

I believe in a philosophy that sometimes you have to invest upfront time to save time later. That is at the essence of Kitchen Monki’s grocery list tools and menu planner. The upfront investment comes from entering recipes in our structured format. We know this takes somewhat longer than simply printing a recipe and filing it, but I’ve already saved a ton of time, and become a better cook, by having my repertoire in this format, searchable and accessible from anywhere, including my phone. Thanks to all those new users who figured out the recipe entry format and uploaded some great-looking dishes.

As you know, we’re just getting going. Please tell your friends. We’d especially appreciate any media introductions. We continue to be amazed at the pervasive importance of good cooking to so many people.

We appreciate your support. Thanks for using Kitchen Monki.

Sam Kinney
Co-founder and Top Banana