<<Disclaimer: Verify this information before applying it to your situation.>>

Last week, Google Base went live, and I think it could be very useful to
the celiac community.

http://base.google.com/

Chances are, if you've heard or read about it, Google Base sounds like a
glorified classified ad. And it can be used for that. But it's real
purpose is to be able to store, share, and search databases. And the magic
is in the way they've implemented it.

There are many ways we could use this to help out each other, but the best
use I can think of is in sharing GF recipes. There is a recipe category.
Anyone can go put all the recipes they want up for free.

These recipes can be shared with friends like these two recipes I put in:

http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=392461334338676479

http://base.google.com/base/items?oid=1096211183749441830

The great thing about this is that every item can be tagged with
searchable keywords. I would suggest that we all include "gluten-free" and
"celiac" in the keywords, along with any others that might be appropriate,
such as "egg-free", etc. We need to be consistent about the spelling and
punctuation about these keywords for them to be most useful.

So, if you select the "recipes" category from the main page, and then type
"gluten-free" in the search box and click on the "Search in recipes" radio
button, you will end up with a list of all the recipes in the system that
have "gluten-free" as a keyword. You can, of course, get more specific
than that, too.

If a recipe that is to be posted to the listserv is already in Google
Base, all you have to include is the URL to it.

To keep this useful, we should only tag as gluten-free recipes which are
truely gluten-free variations on otherwise glutenous foods. It's easy to
substitute GF bread or pasta or soy sauce, so we shouldn't have to wade
through recipes which only make those kinds of changes. Recent recipes
like the angel food cake would be a good candidate for the gluten-free
keyword.

To publish anything in Google Base, you must have a Google account. But if
you have a gmail account, then you are already set. If not, it is easy to
set up an account, and there are all sorts of cool things you can do once
you have one.



-Theron Trowbridge
^

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