Webware

If you think these prices are good, wait until you apply coupon code ENTREE.

We interrupt your regularly scheduled tech deals to bring you this important bulletin...

Food!

Specifically, restaurant food. As many of you know, Restaurant.com sells gift certificates for a fraction of their face value. And right now, you can buy them for a fraction of that fraction.

For example, $25 certificates normally sell for $10, but if you enter coupon code ENTREE at checkout, the price drops to $2. And $10 certificates, normally $4, drop to just 80 cents. Yowza.

For those unfamiliar with Restaurant.com, the only real "string" attached is a minimum food or drink purchase. However, it's not like you have to order the lobster tail and a case of wine. To use a $10 certificate, for example, your total bill usually has to be at least $20.

What's nice is that you can print the coupons right on your own printer; they're immediately ready for use. They're also transferable, so they make ideal last-minute gifts.

In these horrendous economic times, this offer is too good to pass up. Just make sure to read all the terms and conditions before you buy your certificates, just so you avoid any nasty surprises when the check comes.

Also, I'm not sure when this coupon code expires, so if you're interested, act fast. Bon appetit!

Instructional-video site 5min announced on Monday that it has partnered with Scripps Networks to offer programing from the broadcast company on its site. Scripps Networks owns television brands HGTV, Food Network, DIY Network, and Fine Living Network, among others.

Under the deal, Scripps plans to distribute some of its video content from its home and food channels to 5min. Scripps is currently offering content on topics ranging from work around the home to meal preparation.

As with any partnership, there is a financial side to this deal. According to the companies, Scripps will start offering its advertisers the opportunity to target 5min users through its Home and Food pages.

5min will also provide its content to Scripps Network sites. The companies didn't divulge which videos will be offered, but it did say that it would syndicate "contextually relevant" content to the company's sites.

Related story: How to find how-tos on the Web

(Credit: Andrew Mager)

I smell a trend, and it smells like greasy pepperoni: Pizza chains Domino's and Pizza Hut both put out announcements on Thursday concerning their new social-media publicity strategies. In other words, there are new ways to bring the habit of stuffing one's face with mediocre pizza into one's ever-increasingly digital lifestyle.

Pizza Hut, for one, will be giving away free orders of "Stuffed Pizza Rolls" (Did you just hear that little cry? It was my arteries screaming for mercy at the mere thought of this) on July 4 to its Facebook fans and Twitter followers via a promotional code. This is, the pizza chain has said, to commemorate the milestone of one million Facebook fans as well as the hiring of its official "Twintern," an intern whose official job is to maintain the @pizzahut Twitter account.

Domino's, meanwhile, has revved up its online ordering system so that if you order a pizza you can track it on Facebook and Twitter, among other things.

Critics already say we're hooked up to Facebook and Twitter as though they were feeding tubes, so I guess it's appropriate. But all in all, neither campaign is as clever as that time that Burger King promised a free Whopper to people who could prove that they had deleted ten people from their Facebook friends list. (Facebook got mad and disbanded the campaign.)

Let me be clear about this. I live in New York, where we are very serious about the quality of our pizza. In fact, in this city if you make gross pizza you pretty much have to give it away for free, and not just as part of a one-day Twitter gimmick. Case in point: Crocodile Lounge, a bar on East 14th St. where if you buy a beer, they give you a voucher for free pizza. That is the truth, assuming you can elbow your way past the inebriated frat boys in order to reach the pizza pickup station in the back of the bar. Trust me, nobody would eat that pizza if it weren't free.

So what I mean to say is that I appreciate good pizza, and I don't give a hoot if the ordering process is spiced up with Twitter coupons, Facebook Connect tracking updates, a Ustream feed in the kitchen where it's made, or GPS chips to track it on Google Latitude. Social media does not make your food taste better, and as I recall from the last time I had some, both Domino's and Pizza Hut could use a leg up in the quality department.

It's sort of like toppings. Piling sausage, mushrooms, peppers, and bacon on top of a crappy slice of plain pizza does not make it a good slice of pizza. But a great slice of no-frills tomato pie? Absolutely priceless.

Use coupon code 'SAVE' to get $25 vouchers for $3.

(Credit: Restaurant.com)

Hungry? Like to dine out? Restaurant.com normally lets you buy $25 gift certificates for $10, but right now you can scoop them up for just $3 apiece. Simply enter coupon code SAVE when you get to the shopping cart.

Anyone familiar with Restaurant.com knows there are usually a few small strings attached, like a minimum food or drink purchase. However, it's not like you have to order a case of wine or anything. And you can print the coupon right on your own printer: It's immediately ready for use.

A few months back I used one of the gift certificates for a local Italian place, and except for a slight delay while the manager called to verify the coupon, everything went smoothly.

In these horrendous economic times, this deal is too good to pass up. Just make sure to read all the terms and conditions before you buy your certificates, just so you avoid any nasty surprises when the check comes. Bon appetit!

GoodGuide, the service that tells you how environmentally friendly your bottle of shampoo or other household product is, now tracks food items. And not just nutritional content either. The site puts food items up against the same microscope it does for all the other products in its database, showing you how a food item stacks up against others in the same category, and what kind of score the parent company has.

Essentially it's all the things that makes GoodGuide really work, like finding out if your laundry detergent is killing polar bears; something you can now check for your breakfast cereal.

For now, the database of food products is right around 5,000 items, a number which GoodGuide founder Dr. Dara O'Rourke says will be growing by "tens of thousands" in the next few weeks. In the meantime, something that's noticeably missing is junk food. This is by design and meant to encourage people to search for and discover healthy food items. This means that Oreo cookies, Easy Cheese, Hostess Twinkies, and a good number of candy items are nowhere to be found, which I found slightly disappointing. While it's great to know what a good job you're doing by buying locally-grown organic cereal and free-range beef, half of the fun of the site can be discovering which products are an absolute scourge both to your body and the earth.

GoodGuide now tells you how good or bad your favorite foods are. In this case you should stay away from this mac and cheese.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In one of the most useful and engaging Web 2.0 productivity apps we've seen in ages, Bacolicious promises to make your browsing experience so very delicious by superimposing an image of a piece of tasty, tasty bacon over everything you navigate.

Here's how you use it: Type in the Bacolicious URL followed by the URL you would like to load. So, for example, http://bacolicio.us/http://icanhazcheezburger.com if you think that your grammatically challenged cat would like to have a bacon "cheezburger."

It's all part of the bizarre Internet meme centered on borderline cult worship of bacon, as seen in the rise of blogs like Bacon Bacon Bacon. See also: Pancakes. Now I'm really hungry.

Happy Friday.

My CNET handler called today. He is the man who yanks at the dog lead permanently attached around my throat and croaks: "Write, puppy, write."

My handler said he had been present at last week's Crunchie awards, something to do with giving chocolate bars to fine new Internet companies. And he told me that he heard Google's Marissa Mayer whisper that in these times of infinite woe, more people were googling "recipes" than "restaurants."

The first thought that came into my mind was just one word: raccoon. You see, these brazen, beady-eyed burglars waft around my neighborhood fueled by the desire to eat everything I own. Yes, even my house. And whenever I see them, I wonder what they would taste like barbecued with some roast potatoes and a little broccoli.

Now I discover that raccoon is rapidly becoming the other dark meat. The raccoon apparently had pride of place in the first edition of the Joy Of Cooking in 1931. And here's the good news: you can buy one for between $3 and $7.

With that tiny outlay, one that simultaneously eliminates one of the lower-level civil servants of the animal world, you can feed five people.

Knock my trash cans over one more time and you might find yourself baked with apples.

(Credit: CC Michael Sheltgen)

Please enjoy these words, printed in the Kansas City Star, from Jeff Beringer, a furbearer resource biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation: "Raccoon meat is some of the healthiest meat you can eat. During grad school, my roommate and I ate 32 'coons one winter. It was all free, and it was really good. If you think about being green and eating organically, raccoon meat is the ultimate organic food."

Yes, those varminty scavengers who try to knock over my trash cans have no steroids, no antibiotics, no growth hormones--just my evil thoughts drifting around their systems.

If you are, by any chance, offered a raccoon by a man in a highway rest area, here's the simple test: Trappers chop only three of the raccoon's four paws off. This is simply to prove that the carcass is not that of a cat or a dog.

Thankfully, when you Google "raccoon recipes," the first one that comes up is from Cooks.com. It is, indeed, barbecued raccoon. And it sounds, I know you'll agree, very tasty.

I feel confident that the minute I post this elegy to one of man's favorite little critters, demand for raccoon cuisine creativity will shoot up. Perhaps there will soon be an edition of Top Chef devoted to the furry one. (Can there possibly be such a thing as rack of raccoon?)

I sincerely hope that Marissa and the other steaming brains at Google are fully prepared for a massive change in America's eating habits.

(Credit: Burger King)

Facebook's developer platform has been used for a zillion marketing campaigns so far, but this one is actually dead-on hilarious.

Fast-food chain Burger King has created "Whopper Sacrifice," a Facebook app that will give you a coupon for a free hamburger if you delete 10 people from your friends list.

Burger King has put out some interesting campaigns as of late ("Whopper Virgin," "Subservient Chicken"), but this one piques our interest because of how gleefully it pokes fun at our social-networking obsessions. "Now is the time to put your fair-weather Web friendships to the test," the Whopper Sacrifice site explains. "Install Whopper Sacrifice on your Facebook profile, and we'll reward you with a free flame-broiled Whopper when you sacrifice ten of your friends.

The funniest part: The "sacrifices" show up in your activity feed. So it'll say, for example, "Caroline sacrificed Josh Lowensohn for a free Whopper." Unfortunately, you can't delete your whole friends list and eat free (however unhealthily) for a week. The promotion is limited to one coupon per Facebook account.

My Facebook friends had better appreciate the fact that I made a New Year's resolution to cut out red meat. Hint, hint.

Based on the growing size of our layoff tracker and the number of pitches we get starting with "in today's tough economic climate..." it's a great time to launch a service that helps save people cash. Grocio is no stranger to that idea, and lets you comparison shop for groceries without even having to leave the house.

Assuming you're the kind of person who sticks to their shopping list, and nothing but what's on that list this could end up being an incredibly handy service. It plugs into pricing provided by local retailers (including any coupons you might have on hand) to let you know which store has the lowest price, along with how much your shopping list will cost at each retailer.

The service hasn't launched yet, and is rolling out in limited markets to begin with, but you can see a demo of how it works here. Something tells me this would be a huge hit with college students if you could narrow it down to just beer and snacks.

Related: GroceryGuide: Local food deals and sales database extraordinaire

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Add items to your list and price check them at various retailers with Grocio.

(Credit: Grocio)