How do you store all of the recipes you find online, in cookbooks, or even the ones you make up yourself? Having access to millions of recipes online can be a very cool thing, but after printing a couple dozen recipes (and sometimes reprinting recipes because I lost the old copy) it starts to seem a little crazy. So we set up an old laptop in our kitchen that we weren’t terrible in love with – one that we won’t cry over if it somehow dies a horrible, messy death – and then my husband did something kind of amazing – he made me my very own “recipe wiki”.

Basically this is a sort of online database of all of our recipes, organized in a Wikipedia-like style – hosted on our server, which is awesome because that means it’s always fast to load.

I love this because I can enter in recipes from all over the net (or from magazine clippings, etc.) and have them all in one place, with no more paper clutter.

Here’s how to set up your very own, local-network wiki:

Step 1) Follow these steps to install media wiki.  Note that this requires a webserver and database server: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Installation_guide
Step 2) (Optional) Setup a DNS server (I used dnsmasq: http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/doc.html). This will let you type in ‘recipes’ in your browser’s location bar, and be taken to your wiki.  With very few computers, you can skip the DNS server (and edit the hosts file on all the computers involved).
Step 3) Edit your hosts file. On linux, OSX, BSD, and any other sane operating system, it’s /etc/hosts.  On Windows, it’s in c:\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Add this line to the file:

192.168.0.1    recipes

(Here, 192.168.0.1 is the IP of your computer. ‘recipes’ is the name you want to type in.)
Step 4) If you’re using dnsmasq, restart it so it will reload your hosts file and know that ‘recipes’ means ‘go to 192.168.0.1′.  You will also need to make sure that all your computers use your new DNS server as a nameserver.
Step 5) Navigate to http://recipes/ and start adding recipes!