The observant amongst you may have noticed we had a couple of hours of unexpected down-time last night. Oops. What was supposed to be a routine software upgrade on our server turned out to be a bit more involved than predicted. As a result, we were off-line for a chunk of the evening.

But we’re back, and running faster and more reliably than ever! Thanks have to go to our friends at our great Edinburgh-based web hosting provider, Xeriom Networks who were ready as always to step in and save the day if we made a real mess of the server!

The geeks among you might be interested to know that EdinburghMenus.com is now running on the latest version of PHP 5 (5.2.4) and MySQL (5.0.44). How exciting. As well as making the site a bit snappier generally, this software upgrade will make it easier for us to incorporate some new features like OpenID logins and Facebook integration.

Some users on EdinburghMenus.com have written literally dozens of reviews now. As you’ll already know from our previous post, we love stats! So we’ve improved the profile pages for all of our users to include a little graph showing how many reviews they have left for each level of rating. Clicking on any bar in the graph will show only reviews left by that reviewer with that rating.

We also added a few extra stats in there about average number of words per review and stuff. While we were in there tinkering around with the profile pages, we organised it all a bit better so you can immediately see that user’s latest reviews and their favourite businesses. It was a bit rubbish before, if we’re going to be honest!

A good way to see the improved profile pages in action is to look at the profile page for our most prolific reviewer, jwjlewis.

Statistics are great, no matter how misleading they may be at times.

There is an ever increasing amount of data on the EdinburghMenus.com database and we thought it would be interesting to generate some statistics based on that wealth of information.

The statistics page currently shows information about members like who has written the most reviews, the longest reviews and who is considered the most trustworthy by the system.

Statistics about businesses show which businesses have the most reviews, where has been rated highest and where the lowest. The statistics for best and worst rated businesses only take into account businesses with more that 2 reviews. Once there are more reviews on the site this will be changed to show only businesses with more than 5 reviews, to make the results more reliable.

To see all this in action, visit the review statistics page.

Regular visitors to EdinburghMenus.com might not have noticed anything new features added to the site in the last couple of weeks.

But don’t despair! We’ve been working hard behind the scenes doing things that you won’t notice immediately. We’ve been optimising and streamlining the code that runs the site which will enable us to add new features more rapidly in the future.

There has been plenty user activity on the site though, as usual. In fact, we recently passed the 300 review mark. That means that since we launched the site at the end of June, there have been an average of almost 5 new reviews per day on the site! Thanks a lot to all our reviewers!

With so many reviews now on the site, there are a number of businesses with multiple reviews. By default, reviews are shown below a listing with those written by the most trusted reviewers first. To help you sort through all these reviews, it is now possible to reorder the reviews by date or rating as well. To help you guage how trustworthy a review is, we have also added the trust rating for each user in brackets after their name. You can find out more about the EdinburghMenus.com moderation and trust rating system in our previous post.