How often have you suggested to somebody that you meet for a coffee or some food at some point between where each of you live? And how often have you found it difficult to decide where is about halfway? And have you ever been going somewhere and wanted to stop for coffee or some food on the way but found it hard to think of what is en-route?

Well, to help you out in situations like this, we’ve come up with a new search tool - the between search. You just enter what you’re looking for and the two locations that you want to find places between. Just like the normal quick search on EdinburghMenus.com, the locations can be postcodes, streets, areas or even big Edinburgh landmarks.

On your way to the castle from your flat in Stockbridge and want to stop for coffee on the way? Just enter ‘cafe’, ‘castle’ and ’stockbridge’ into the between search. (try it). Live on Marchmont Road and want meet your friend from Leith for pizza somewhere in between? ‘Pizza’, ‘marchmont road’ and ‘leith’ will sort you out. (try it).

As always, search results are plotted on a GoogleMap. When you hover over a result, as well as displaying the most basic information about the business, you will also be shown how far that business is from the exact midpoint of the two locations you entered. Good for settling the occasional argument about who had to travel further to meet up!

Online review sites with a user added reviews are tricky things. How do you know that the reviews on the site are in any way authentic? Who’s to say that the good reviews weren’t added by the business owners signing up as loads of different people and that the bad reviews weren’t added by their competitors doing the same? The truth is, you never know 100%. But here at EdinburghMenus.com, we’ve built lots of systems and procedures into the site to make sure the reviews are as trustworthy as possible while keeping it nice and easy for people to add reviews.

There are a few ways that we do this, the most obvious being our policy of manually checking reviews submitted by guests and new users. Once a new user has written a couple of (sensible!) reviews, they will be upgraded to “reviewer” status and thereafter their reviews will immediately go live on the site.

But EdinburghMenus.com is a site that relies first and foremost on its users to provide the content, and it therefore also makes sense that the site’s users also contribute to maintaining the authenticity and usefulness of reviews on the site. That is why, when you are logged in, below every review on the site there are a series of dropdown selectors. These dropdowns allow you to say whether you found the review useful or not; whether or not you agree with it and whether you found it funny or boring. The number in brackets after each dropdown gives the current “score” for each moderation category.

Every time you select something from one of these dropdowns, the EdinburghMenus.com machine reevaluates how trustworthy it deems that review (and its author) based on how other users have moderated the comment and adjusts its position accordingly. If a review is constantly being marked as not useful or people are overwhelmingly disagreeing with a review, it may be removed. Unfortunately, no matter how boring a review is regarded, so long as it appears trustworthy, it will stay! Other factors that affect how trustworthy a review is regarded include the number of reviews left by that user, the user level of that user and whether or not they have confirmed their email address.

Of course, to prevent abuse of the system, you can’t moderate your own reviews or moderate the same review by another user more than once. To ensure that people don’t sign up as a few different people and systematically moderate up the reviews for each user, the system will keep an eye out for such tomfoolery and those guilty will have their reviews removed, be banned from the site and generally given a jolly good ticking off.

I’m not going to patronise you by explaining to you what RSS feeds are. If you’re reading the development blog of a “Web 2.0″ kind of web site, I reckon there’s a fair chance that you’re down with the whole syndication thing.

So I’ll just use this post to tell you a bit about the implementation of RSS on EdinburghMenus.com and a couple of neat little things about them that you might not have noticed…

Our basic RSS feed contains the most recent reviews written on the site. There is also a custom feed for every business showing the most recent reviews written about that business. And finally, every registered user has their own RSS feed showing the most recent reviews written by them. You can grab these customised feeds from the listing page for any business or the profile page of any user.

Now something you might not have noticed — our RSS feeds contain embedded geographical data about the business. This means that not only can you view the RSS feeds in your newsreader, or whatever, as normal, you can also do clever stuff with the coordinates in the feed to display the reviews on a map. To quickly and easily see this in action, look what happens when you just paste the entire URI of a feed into a Google Maps search.

If there are any other feeds you’d like us to make available (perhaps newest businesses on the site or the current highest rated businesses), just let us know — EdinburghMenus.com is constantly in development and we’ll happily implement new features that our users will find useful.

EdinburghMenus.com now supports microformats.

In brief, microformats consist of snippets of information hidden within the code of a webpage written in a way that computers can understand. Software can pick up on this hidden code and identify information about reviews, businesses and people mentioned on a web site. The idea is that this will make it easier to generate links between different web sites and services and be a way to link up all the disparate information that can be found on the internet.

To be honest, this is of limited use just now, as current browsers don’t pay any attention to this extra information, unless you have installed a microformats extension to a good browser. But hopefully within the next couple of years, microformats will be as ubiquitous around the web as RSS feeds are today. The next major release of Firefox is going to incorporate support for them and it can only be a matter of time before the major search engines wise up too.

EdinburghMenus.com now uses the hReview standard for all reviews on the site and all business listings have an hCard hidden behind the scenes. Reviewers are also tagged with an hCard, but don’t panic — we don’t give away any more information about you via microformats than is already available on screen.

Apologies non-geeks — I’ll try to make the next post more interesting!

With sites like EdinburghMenus.com, it can be hard to know how much is really going on in the site by just looking at the home page. Is the site active, or does nobody ever visit and is all of the information out of date?

Since we launched the site (all those days ago) we’ve had a “recent reviews” panel on the home page. This is great as you can see immediately whether or not there is any activity on the site and it gives the visitor somewhere to go to as soon as they visit. And if the reviewer did a sketch to go with their review, something nice to look at on the front page too.

But there is more happening at EdinburghMenus.com than just restaurant and takeaway reviews (although they are the most interesting bit). People are signing up, editing business listings, adding menus and photos, adding whole new businesses and confirming that details for listings are correct. So, inspired by our favourite social networking site, the home page now has a News Feed on it, telling you who’s been doing what on the site and when.

Shy? Don’t want your reviews and site edits paraded in front of everybody on the home page? If an item in the news feed relates to something you have contributed to the site, a “Delete” link will appear beside it. Just click the link and the item will disappear from the news feed.

Remember, the site is still in active development, so if you have any suggestions for improvements to this feature, or any ideas for anything else to improve the site, please leave a comment here or send us a message!