Happy Labour Day everyone!
Since my last post dealt with recipe management and I'm now tempted to make more cookies and stuff, it seemed only right to share another little gem I've found which I use to keep track of my fitness level and calories consumed.
It's called "FitClick", and can be found here http://www.fitclick.com. It's a great website, free of course, and lets you keep track of not only your calorie consumption but any fitness activity you do on a given day. You can use a workout plan or diet plan provided by them, or you can create your own custom plan. It lists almost 800 exercises so that calories burned can be calculated and thousands of food items and the calories that are consumed. It's a bit slow sometimes, and I'm a bit unclear as to how to repeat the same exercise routine day after day (which is what I do), but since creating your own routine is simple it is doable (just a few too many clicks for me).
There is no software to download, it is entirely web based, and there are support forums, so it is really like a facebook site for fitness buffs. You can even enter two pictures, one before and one after.
I think it's a great service and will undoubtedly make more aware of what I'm eating if I have to record something each time.
My rating: 4 stars out of 5! 
Ok, this next review has nothing to do with web design, distance education, technology or anything like that. I was feeling nostalgic today and decided to whip up a batch of my Grandma's Oatmeal Cookies and my mom's Whipped Shortbread. I don't get much time to do it so I make a lot when I do. Even though my Grandma died many years ago, her cookies are still to die for. I made sure my mom got the recipe from her before it was gone forever. My mom is in a nursing home now, and when I started going through her stuff, one of the things I wanted to take my time with were her hundreds of recipes for Christmas cookies, cakes, and casseroles. They were in a mish mash of forms, some hand scribbled, some typed (with a typewriter, remember those?), some printed out, some newspaper clippings. They were all butter soaked, raggedly edged, and almost fell apart when I started handling them. She had at least 5 binders that were bursting at the seams full of recipes, and were in no particular order. Even though Mom knew where everything was, for someone like me trying to find that one special cookie recipe it could take awhile to find the "one" you were looking for.
In my constant quest for cool & free stuff, I was determined to find something that would facilitate organizing these recipes so that I could find things easier. I finally found something that exceeded my expectations. It is called "Recipe Center Software". I downloaded it and installed it and was immediately impressed. For a free title, it packs a huge punch. It facilitates units of measurements and auto fills them for you as you are entering your ingredients. It will automatically calculate new quantities of each ingredient should you decide to double or half your recipe. You can assign keywords to each recipe, such as "high-fibre", "seasonal", etc., and if the keyword you want isn't there, you can create your own. You can search for recipes by title or by keyword, and you can automatically add the ingredients you need for a recipe to a virtual shopping cart, so you'll know how much to buy to do your cooking or baking. You can even create your recipe with a photo if you want, so it looks like what you'd see in a cookbook.
But perhaps the coolest thing of all is that the same company that provides the software has another site that has literally thousands of recipes created by other users of the software. The database is searchable by keyword or title. You can upload your recipes to share with others or download something you want for your collection but don't already have.
How many times have you come across an interesting recipe in a magazine and kept the whole magazine lying around just for that recipe? I used to do that all the time, but now I just enter it in my recipe database and toss the magazine. I'm slowly entering all of my mom's recipes and a bunch that I have lying around so soon I won't need a cookbook anymore.
The GUI skin can be changed to one of many supplied themes, and you can print recipes in a variety of formats, including full page format, small recipe card format, or larger recipe card format. You can also create a PDF version of the recipe so you can email it.
Off I go to pig out on those great cookies, goodbye diet.... :)
You can get the software at http://recipecentersoftware.com/ and the recipes at http://www.recipecenter.com/
My rating: 4.5 stars out of 5!
