SlimCalories

SlimCalories is a reference site for people counting what they eat. You drill down through a hierarchy — supermarkets, fast food, restaurants, coffee shops, then a retailer, then an aisle — until you reach a single product, and that page gives you its calories, kilojoules and the equivalent diet-plan value, with a portion-size calculator to scale it. There are around 80,000 of those product pages. No accounts, no food diary, nothing to install: it is a lookup, and people arrive by typing the name of a specific product into Google.

I built it for someone else, who runs it — so the site speaks in their voice rather than mine. It began as a way to make those values searchable on the open web. Two earlier attempts at the same job were named after the diet plan's own terminology and were shut down after legal complaints from Slimming World. This one is named after calories instead: a safer place to stand, and a more accurate description of what the database actually holds.

I should be straight about what this is: an SEO content asset rather than an application. It draws about a thousand people a month from long-tail search — real, but small — and the advertising on it earns close to nothing, because the traffic is too diffuse and diet-vertical ad rates too low for display advertising to pay for itself. It has run unattended for a long time, which is rather the point of building it the way it was built.