Now that Purim is behind us, I thought I could lighten the tension of Pesach on the horizon by introducing a little fun to my site. This is one of those places where my web development and culinary worlds happily collide.

Site owners are always looking for a way to engage their users. Borrowing from the tradition of the Boy Scouts®, and/or the military, a system of ranks and achievement badges encourage users to visit the site more frequently to unlock various achievements and rise up through levels.

The level badge pictured on the right is the highest level you can achieve on this site. Do you have what it takes to be a Culinary Legend?

The folks at CaptainUp.com have come up with a brilliant badge Web service. And, they’re in Israel, too! How cool is that?

I changed the default badges into ones with culinary themes. As far as achievements go, I’m still getting my own set created, so you might see a couple of the default achievement badges before I get to them. In case you can’t tell, the level badges are a top-down view into a pot. See the handles?

When you log in, share, like, tweet, g+, comment, etc. you get points. Points increase your level. When you do something in a time period, or a certain number of times, you get points and an achievement badge. The game console on the lower right of the screen helps you keep track of where you are, as well as lets you know how you’re doing on achievements. And yeah, that’s a retro joystick. Yeah, I had an Atari. Like I said, awesome!

I can also bury hidden achievements. The one I’m going to tell you about is Background Check. If you visit my Personal Chef and About pages on the same day and spend at least 30 minutes on the site, you’ll unlock it.

Back to the developer me. If you want this mechanism for your site, please let me know. It’s easy enough to implement, and the levels and badges are fun for me to make. Almost as much as pickles. Or fresh pasta.

If you didn’t get the title reference, it’s from Wargames.

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