Typepad Does Not Support Google Recipe View on Blogs (Updated - It Kinda Does)

ADDED LATER

There is a not-very-elegant workaround but my position on the problem stands. I'm talking to Typepad in tickets about the simple changes they would have to make to more fully support Recipe View. In the meantime, my transformation spell will include instructions on how to make it work on Typepad. See this for more.

Let me just start with a giant WTF.

WTF?

Ah! I feel better and I'll get to why in just a moment...

If you hang around food sites much, you may have heard about Google Recipe View. It's a highly selective search method that Google conjured up recently. When you click on it, you are presented with a tiny subset of recipes that are available on big corporate sites like Epicurious. There are a handful of big blogs included at the moment (literally under a dozen) which is pretty pathetic when you consider the tens of thousands of unique and interesting food sites that exist.

I expect that as Google begins to let blogs in - there is some mystical, black box method of selection - and sites provide useful data for the search refinements (it's largely useless now) it will be a worthwhile thing. For now, I am eschewing Recipe View for my personal use in favor of the broader and more interesting searches available with all of the web or even just blogs. Give it a while to mature.

In the meantime, there is a lot of work to be done by bloggers who want to have their recipes show up. Things like recoding every single recipe post with a seriously painstaking mass of code. This is an awful lot of work and many people are opting to wait until there are tools available that make it simple to meet Google's requirements.

So I made one.

It is really cool, if I do say so myself, automating a number of things that are done manually in existing methods and I am really excited about how it is turning out. Everything was curising along until I went to test a recipe against the Google Validation tool and discovered that Typepad doesn't let me use any of the code. None of the formats that are used to include recipes in Googles Recipe View are supported by Typepad sufficeiently to get recipes into Google Recipe View. Blogger, sure. Wordpress, no problem. Typepad, critical code disappears. Machine readable time codes, for example, which Google has defined as required in the initial implementation. Poof! Gone. This is most disconcerting.

Since I buried the lede, let me repeat it.

None of the formats that are used to include recipes in Googles Recipe View are sufficiently supported by Typepad.

Between shaking my head in befuddlement at this decision (there don't seem to be technical reasons to strip the code) I am continuing to work on the tool since others will benefit where I can not. It's a few days out from release, I need to build the UI and get beta testers to beat upon it before I let it out in the wild. Not to mention go to a Blogger blog to do my validation. Next week some time.

I assume that Typepad is planning on supporting the required XML in the future (it is/will be used by a lot more than food blogs) but at the moment, Typepad users seem to be out in the cold. I am not happy about this and I bet if you have a Typepad blog you aren't either.

Here's what we need to do.

Please join me in letting Typepad know that this is not acceptable and asking them (nicely) to please add support for the microdata required for Google Recipe View to work. (Those are links below, my CSS is flaking for some people, sorry.)

Ask Typepad on twitter

Open a help ticket to request this be added

Have you used Recipe View? What did you think?

If you a blogger, are you planning on converting your recipes?