New Celiac Sprue Website

[tzeskimo]

I was diagnosed with Celiac Sprue last December, and I've quickly grown frustrated with the process of figuring out if foods with questionable ingredients (i.e. natural flavoring) are gluten free. To help with the problem, I've created a website called sprued (www.sprued.com). I just released the site a couple of days ago, and it would be super cool if a few people could check out the site and let me know what they think.

The site has three key components: a food database where people vote on whether food contains gluten, a recipe database, and a forum. My aspiration is that sprued can act as an easily searchable aggregator of all the celiac informations that is currently sprinkled around the far corners of the web. Rather than typing in a questionable food on google and having to read through a couple dozen forums, it would be much nicer if you could just swing by sprued and get a general sense of peoples opinion about a food as well as a few helpful links (ideally to the gf section of a manufacturers website). There are also a couple of cool featured I'd like to implement in the future if people are interested, such as a searchable map with recommended celiac friendly restaurants (like www.yelp.com but on a smaller scale).

The site is still a little rough around the edges, since it is was just released. My roommate, a talented web designer that is doing the final site design, is not yet finished, so I substituted my rather weak design skills in the mean time. None-the-less, I think the site could be really helpful if used by enough people, so please take a look.

Thanks for the help,
Keith

[WestinsMom]

Bravo! I think a site like this is needed. We have paid for lists, but they don't do us much good because there are so many items from different areas of the country. I feel like I wasted money as I don't really find it helpful. I added your site as a favorite and I will check back to see how it is doing. Thank you for the effort!

[tzeskimo]

Thanks a bunch. To be honest, I'm really surprised another site like this doesn't exist. Luckily, not only am I a celiac, I'm also a nerdy computer programmer :)

[Ellen]

Since you asked ;-)....I clicked on foods to "find the ingredients that contain hidden gluten" and all it was was a list of sodas where 1 person "thought" they were gluten free. For people with celiac, they need to KNOW if products are gluten free. Opinion without science doesn't seem helpful. That would have been enough for me not to return to the website.

In general, I don't register for websites where I simply want to get information.

There's no "Contact" information on the website. I would have sent you my opinion via email instead of posting it here in public.

[tzeskimo]

No, this is great feedback. I don't mind at all that it's posted in public. First off, that one person is me, because I'm really the only person who's used the website (like I said, it's brand new...it's not even on google yet). I've been slowly inputing foods, and I just happened to start on Pepsi and Coke products, because they have sections in their websites that list which of their products are gluten free. Obviously, this isn't super useful, but like any community driven site, it'll become more helpful as more people participate and enter foods. My hope is that over the course of a year or two a fairly comprehensive list will develop.

The "think" vs "know" issue is kind of tricky. The site is entirely driven by user content, so the gluten free status of foods on the site is definitely just an opinion. However, I feel the opinion of other celiacs about the gluten-free status of foods is considered useful, since people post questions and answers about foods constantly on celiac forums. I find the whole process of searching through tons of threaded forums to gather user opinion about foods time consuming and fustrating, so I thought a nice, searchable database with a summary of user opinion and links for each food to more information would be a better solution.

As a celiac myself, in the end, the only source I truly trust is the manufacturer and the food label. However, it would be really nice if I could type in food, such as mustard, and get a list of the mustards most people believe are safe to eat, and a list of mustards I should avoid. I would then know what to look for at the grocery store (though I'll still need to read the labels). Or, if the food has a mystery ingredient, I would like to know whether or not most people think the food is safe to eat (and why). Ideally, there would also be some helpful links posted so I could get more information.

Anyway, I don't know if other people will agree that this is a better approach than a forum, but since I do, I thought I would give it a try.

I definitely need to put up contact information. I'll do that as soon as I'm finished with this post :)

As far as creating an account, you should be able to access all the content on the site without registering. There just isn't a lot of content yet, since the site is very new. The only thing an unregistered user cannot do is create content, because if I allowed anonymous content, I'd be opening up the site to a ton of spam.

Thanks a bunch for the feedback.

[WestinsMom]

I was under the impression that you were just getting it started. I didn't expect it to be full functioning. I think it has great potential. I hope you don't get discouraged. :)

[tzeskimo]

Thanks a bunch for the support. Don't worry, I'm not discouraged yet. I think Ellen makes a great point. I don't think the way Sprued currently displays foods inspires much confidence. The vote system doesn't make a ton of sense, isn't very useful until there are a lot of users, and in the end, just doesn't say very much (who cares what some random person's unsubstantiated opinion is).

Taking this feedback into account, I'm going to completely rework how foods are presented. I'm going to remove the vote system, and instead emphasize research. Each food will have a research page, which will contain links to important pieces of information about that food, ideally including a link to a page on the manufacturer's website detailing the food's gluten content. Hopefully, I can think of a good way to summarize this information so the user doesn't have to do a lot of clicking around to figure out if a food is gluten free.

This is definitely a work in progress, so any suggestions about how best to present this information would be greatlly appreciated.

The changes should be up in a couple of days. I'll post an update when it is.

[tzeskimo]

I wanted to give a quick update on the progress of the site. I think I've come up with a revised way of presenting food research that people will find more useful. However, rather than put up the change now, I'm instead going to wait for my roommate to finish the new site design. Then we can put everything up all at once.

His design looks really good, so I'm pretty excited. The change should go live in the next couple of weeks. When it's ready, I'll let everyone know.

[tzeskimo]

I wanted to let everyone know my partner and I have finally finished the site redesign. Here's a link to my new post: http://forums.childrenwithdiabetes.com/showthread.php?p=53942#post53942

I've tried to take people's comments into account. The largest change, beyond the design itself, is the fact that I've removed food votes. Like we discussed earlier, I don't think people can really trust anonymous, unsubstantiated opinions.

Instead, each food now has a question and answer format, where people can attempt to answer specific questions about the gluten content of a food. Rather than describing it in detail, I would suggest people visit the site and check it out (http://www.sprued.com). I highly recommend trying to post a food and then adding some answers to the questions. I think the answer interface is fairly slick, but I'm a bit biased.

Enjoy the site, and like before, let me know what you think!

Keith