Having Trouble Using Chef's Journal?

If you are having problem using Chef's Journal, we would love to help you. If you do not find the answer to your problem, please contact us and we will work to answer your questions.

Email Issues

The Application says the email is sent yet the recipient never receives the email.

Quick Solution

  1. Check your "Junk-mail Folder".
  2. If it isn't there, go to your email's spam filter and enter "chefs-journal.com" as always accept email from these domains.
  3. Make sure there are no "odd" characters such as apostrophes, plus signs, ampersands or other non letter text characters in the username field.
  4. If you have tried all the above, please send us an email and we will check out the problem.

Longer Explanation

Chef's Journal was designed to organize pictures, voice recordings and other text and media in a recipe format. Since you can only send text as an email, and attach media files subject to certain sizing constraints. The application gets around this constraint by uploading all the files associated with a recipe to a server. The server generates a text and HTML file that is sent as an email. The problem is that as far as the recipients email is concerned, this is an HTML email from a relatively unknown domain. The sendmail program uses the domain "chefs-journal.com".

I get an error, like "OOPs - there was an error on the server. Please try again" or "Server not available".

Quick Solution

  1. Make sure you are transmitting while connected to Wi-Fi, not AT&Ts network.
  2. Check to make sure there are no odd characters in the text of recipe. Cutting and pasting from other websites where characters such as the French accent grave, accent aigu, circumflex, or even apostrophes and single quotes can cause problems when they are entered into the database. While we attempt to trap for these characters, we don't always catch them all.
  3. Make sure you have not deleted the title of the recipe.
  4. If you have tried all the above, send us an email and we will try to resolve the problem.

Longer Explanation

Frankly, there is not much we can do about issues with network connectivity. Some media files are very large (particularly voice recordings). The larger and more numerous the files, the more apt there are to be problems on the carriers WAN. In general, we don't seem to have these problems with short recipes (say a couple of pictures and text), and don't seem to have any issues at all when connected to a home LAN over Wi-Fi, both of are also a lot faster than WAN.

With respect to text characters, some characters have special meanings to file transfer and database programs. Even if they are trapped the converted output can look odd when in the HTML email. Foriegn characters in the ALT ASCII range can cause parsing errors in other places. While we continue to work on these problems, we realize that there are short comings in our designs and will resolve these as resources permit.

Facebook Issues

I let a friend or relative use the app to put something on their Facebook page and now I can't get to my Facebook page.

Quick Solution

  1. Log out of your friends facebook page. This will remove the "cookie" that keeps sending you there.

  2. If this doesn't work open the Safari browser on the phone and go to www.facebook.com. Log out of any session prompt that is not your own and log in as yourself.

I get an error, like "OOPs - there was an error on the server. Please try again" or "Server not available".

See the same problem in the email section.