Well, we thought that we’d already made searching for restaurants and takeaways in Edinburgh about as easy as it could get.

Not according to Mystic. He’s been a keen EdinburghMenus.com user since our launch and he suggested that we create a Firefox search plugin so that he can search EdinburghMenus.com without actually going to the site first.

So we did. To add the EdinburghMenus.com search plugin, while on any EdinburghMenus.com page, just click the little dropdown beside the search field at the top of Firefox and select Add ‘EdinburghMenus.com’. Try it right now. You are using Firefox, right?!

Job done.

Now you can search for a business name or type of business and it will load up the results page just as if you’d entered the term into the “What” box on the EdinburghMenus.com site. If you want to see businesses near you, it will also accept an EH post code.

The perfect accessory for the beautiful summer we are all enjoying this year - an EdinburghMenus.com branded umbrella!

To help get the word out on the street that we exist and to encourage more people to sign up and contribute reviews to the site, we are now offering EdinburghMenus.com branded umbrellas to any Edinburgh resident who signs up to the site and writes and least 10 reviews. As soon as you’ve written 10 reviews, contact us and we’ll sort you out. While stocks last!

Have you ever tried using the internet on your mobile phone? It’s useful to be able to do it, but it’s not the most enjoyable experience. Even on the most modern handsets using browsers such as Opera Mini 4, the fact is, most websites just weren’t designed for a postage stamp sized screen — thank goodness!

We know that when you’re out and about, you’re not going to be interested in adding reviews, signing in to your profile or editing any listings on the site. You just want information, and quickly!

That is why we’ve produced EdinMenus.com, a lightweight version of EdinburghMenus.com designed specifically for mobile phones. The site features the same quick and easy search of the full site, as well as full business listings, reviews, menus and even maps. The maps aren’t as fancy as the interactive GoogleMaps on the full site, but they serve their purpose!

We were going to give the mobile version of the site an address like mobile.edinburghmenus.com, or edinburghmenus.com/mobile but thought we’d save your thumbs a bit of work and register EdinMenus.com. Those other addresses will feel just fine though, if you want to give your flabby thumbs a workout!

If you have to pay for your internet usage by the kb, don’t worry — the EdinMenus.com pages are written in super efficient code so you can rest assured that every kb of data you download contains the maximum amount of Edinburgh restaurant and takeaway information!

Oh oh oh! Almost forgot! As you’re likely to be on a phone when using EdinMenus.com, we figured it might be useful for you to be able to phone the businesses that you find while using the site. So we’ve turned each phone number into a special link so that you can just call them immediately. There’s also a “save” link beside each phone number that will add the phone number to your phone’s phonebook with the name of the business as the name. Yeah, pretty clever, huh?

You can find out a bit more about EdinMenus.com on our about EdinMenus.com page where there is also a mockup of a mobile phone so you can see roughly what it will look like on a mobile device.

Just a quick post to let you know about a couple of new things that have been added to the site in the last few days…

Another new search feature has been added to the site — map search allows you to just pan and zoom around the map of Edinburgh and every time you move, the markers will reload (ajaxtastically) showing the businesses in the current map view. This works best if you’re zoomed in quite far, so to keep it working nice and quick we’ve limited it to 15 markers on screen at once. If there are more than 15 businesses in the current view, the ones nearest the middle of the map are shown. By default, the map will show all businesses, but you can enter a search term to filter the results.

We’ve also added some extra tags for cafes, bars and restaurants in Edinburgh that have wifi and free wifi. So you can now search for things like “wifi pub” near “jeffrey street” (try it) or “free wifi” near “EH3 7BR” (try it). If you know of any other businesses offering wifi and/or free wifi, you can update the site yourself by logging in and editing a listing. To mark a business as having wifi, add the tag “wifi” to the tag list at the bottom of the edit business page. If the wifi is provided free of charge, add the tag “freewifi” as well.

Props to Richard Cross for providing the bulk of the data to enable this useful new feature.

Enjoy!

Ok, so we’ve been live for over a month now and despite the fact that we have the word “menus” in our name, there have been no menus on the site. Shocking. Please accept our sincere apologies.

But as of today, that has changed! It is now possible to add and edit menus for any business on the site. As with all of the business editing features, you need to be logged in to add or edit menus, and if you are not a trusted editor, any changes you make will be moderated before going live on the site. Unlike other sites that simply scan in menus for you to read on screen, all menus on EdinburghMenus.com are entered as normal text. So not only will the menus load quicker, they are easy to read, are accessible to the visually impaired and can be printed easily.

Once there are more menus on the site, we’ll add menu search features so you can search for a specific dish that you want to eat. You want to search for “spaghetti carbonara” near “clerk street”? Watch this space!

With almost a thousand businesses listed on the site, it’s going to take a while before each listing has a menu. We will be contacting business owners shortly giving them each a unique username and password so they can add and edit their own menus instantly.

This service is completely free for the business owners as well as for visitors to the site. If we charged for this, fewer businesses would use it; the site would be less useful; fewer people would visit; fewer reviews would be written; the site would become out of date and eventually our beloved EdinburghMenus.com would become yet another dead restaurant and takeaway guide cluttering up the internet — and we don’t want that!

We’ve added a few menus ourselves for a few businesses to check that the system works and to get the ball rolling (try La Garrigue, Rick Shaws or Zanzero). As with lots of things on the site, this feature is “work in progress”, so please let us know if you have any suggestions about how to improve it!