La Cucina Italiana occupied a significant chunk of our March. Phase Two of that project, which will see the beginnings of that venerable publication’s massive recipe database becoming available on the site, is complete and is only awaiting editorial oversight of the recipes being entered in the database. Phase Three is under discussion, and is the most exciting part from our point of view, as it will allow the site’s readers to engage the brand directly on the site through comments, ratings, and discussion.

We’re drawing closer to the public launch of an interesting project we started last fall with Scott Soloway. We’ll tell you more about this site when it launches, but for the moment we’ll say that it’s a web service of a sort we’d never handled before, and it includes a strong machine-learning component, which we loved.

We learned just a day or two ago that we’ll be building a new iteration of the website for the Track and Field Writers of America (TAFWA), a professional organization Parker has actually belonged to since his days at Runner’s World. Like many professional organizations, TAFWA has a specific audience to address and clear goals and constraints for their site, but their skills tend not to lie in web development or HTML coding. Our goals for this site are to create a site which is easy for non-technical users to maintain but which will help TAFWA itself provide useful services for its members.

With all this contract work going on, you’d worry that our own projects are being neglected. To the contrary, both “common” sites have seen development activity in recent weeks, though not necessarily in visible ways. My post earlier this week sprung from work I’m doing implementing a machine-learning based shoe recommendation system for Common Running, for example, and we’re gearing up to refresh the shoe database with the latest models.

Common Kitchen got a typical update earlier this afternoon, in which we updated the process for adding cookbooks and magazines to the site. This involved ripping out a chunk of code and replacing it with the neater, tighter acts_as_amazon_product code from Netphase. Their code searches books only by default, so we tweaked the plugin a bit ourselves to handle magazines and other product types using an optional parameter. The difference is pretty slight from the user’s end, but it’s typical of the work we’re doing on Common Kitchen nowadays, where we trim, tighten and otherwise refactor the site’s code based on what we’ve learned since we started.

There’s more CMI work waiting in the wings, both some potential outside projects and some ideas we’re brewing for our own sites. We’ll try to keep you posted here!