// the find
LukeSmithxyz/based.cooking
A simple culinary website.
A community-contributed recipe site built on Hugo with a strict no-tracking, no-ads policy and public domain licensing. Think of it as a git-hosted cookbook where contributors submit Markdown files and own nothing — the content belongs to everyone. Aimed at people who want real food recipes without the SEO-stuffed blog preamble.
Zero JavaScript tracking, no cookies, no analytics — the site is genuinely clean in a way almost no food site is. Public domain licensing on all content is rare and actually useful for anyone who wants to reuse or republish recipes. Hugo makes it trivially self-hostable; clone, `hugo serve`, done. The author JSON sidecar pattern for contributor attribution (with optional donation links) is a thoughtful solution to giving credit without building a user system.
No on-site search — 250+ recipes and you're either browsing or using your browser's find-in-page on the index. Recipe quality is entirely manual-moderated by one maintainer who is visibly exhausted by it (the README reads like someone at the end of their rope). No feedback mechanism means there's no way to know if a recipe actually works before you buy ingredients — you're trusting a stranger's Markdown file. Last activity was August 2024 and the pace of merges had already slowed; this is effectively in maintenance mode.