So, you’re browsing new reviews on EdinburghMenus.com and you find a business you want to try sometime. So you make a mental note. And then you forget.

Not any more!

We’ve added a new feature to the site — “to try” lists. To add a business to your “to try” list, you just click the link on the detail page for that business. To view all the businesses that you would like to try, visit your profile.

We have also improved the way that the favourites and to try lists work. Instead of having to reload the page when you add or remove something to one of your lists, it happens instantly by the magic of AJAX. If you have an old browser, or have JavaScript disabled for some reason, it still works, but a page reload will occur.

Aren’t we nice to you? Yes, yes we are.

We like to be on the bleeding edge here at EdinburghMenus.com. That’s why we’re proud to announce that as of today it’s possible to sign up to EdinburghMenus.com with an OpenID.

OpenID is a “decentralized single sign-on system”. Essentially, this means that you sign up once with one of the many OpenID providers, and then you can sign up to OpenID-enabled sites (like EdinburghMenus.com) without having to fill out registration information again and create another username and password that you need to remember. When you return to an OpenID-enabled site that you are a member of, you just sign in using your OpenID URL.

When you sign up to EdinburghMenus.com using your OpenID, we automatically lift personal information from your OpenID account that you are happy to share with us such as your real name, gender, post code and date of birth. It is completely optional to supply this information - we only need you to share your email address and nickname (which will become your username on our site) but any extra information you do share with us will be used to make the EdinburghMenus.com experience all the more amazing.

Although you may have never heard of OpenID before, you may already have one — if you already have an account with AOL, Wordpress, LiveJournal or Technorati you’re good to go. The official OpenID page has more information on this.

It’s all very clever. Only time will tell if it’s really going to take off, but we certainly want to be able say we were there near the start if it does!

If you have already joined EdinburghMenus.com in the old fashioned way and want to assign your OpenID to your account, you can do that in your account settings.

But not in a weird way, honest!

Every time you do a search on EdinburghMenus.com, it gets recorded. Don’t worry, we don’t store any personal details about you — we couldn’t, even if we wanted to. We just record what your search terms were, what time you performed the search and how many results that search gave you.

We are constantly checking this data to make sure that our search engine is producing the best results. Searches that result in no hits get flagged up to us immediately — perhaps a new business has opened up in town that we haven’t noticed and hasn’t been added to the site yet. That’s why you might search for something on the site and not find any results only to discover that the business you wanted gets added 10 minutes later — it’s no coincidence!

Sometimes people search for something with a common mispelling and get no results and think that the business wasn’t listed. Our search engine does make some allowances for the poor spellers out there, but does trip up sometimes. For example, we spotted that somebody searched for “The Sheeps Heid” and got no results. Of course, “The Sheep Heid” is in the database, so we tweaked the search engine to make sure that it shows up for such an occurance in the future.

So keep on searching, and if you don’t get the results you expect, try again in half an hour!

A lot of EdinburghMenus.com was done in a bit of a rush to try and get the site live asap. Now we’ve got time to go back and make things a bit better…

Ok, we know we really should be focusing on some more fundamental features of the site, like making it easier and quicker to add new businesses and menus to the site, but we can’t help but keep tweaking other little bits.

So what’s changed in the last week or so?

• The directory part of the site has been restructured. Now the directory category index shows how many businesses there are for that category in brackets after the link. Once you’re browsing a category in the directory it’s also possible to jump straight to businesses beginning with any letter of the alphabet by clicking the links. Links are disabled for letters that don’t have any businesses starting with that category. Pretty fundamental stuff, we know, but we didn’t get round to doing it earlier!
• New results pagination design. Shamelessly nabbing the design from a couple of our favourite “Web 2.0″ sites, Digg and Flickr, it’s now possible to immediately and easily jump to the next, previous, first, last and adjacent search results whether you’re viewing the directory, search results or reviews.
• New URI structure for businesses. We’ve always been pretty pleased with our clean URI structure. Rather than having long and unmemorable addresses with seemingly random code in them, our URIs are easy to read and hopefully make navigating the site a less confusing experience.
  The URIs for businesses was a little bit rubbish though - rather than using the name of the business to identify the page it used the numeric ID of the business (eg. http://edinburghmenus.com/business/255/). Short, but not very user-friendly. So now businesses have addresses that are just their business name followed by their postcode. Spaces have been replaced with underscores. We’ve also dropped the “business/” bit - it didn’t really make sense - the businesses belong in the “directory” part of the site structure. So the URI for Anima in Stockbridge is now http://edinburghmenus.com/directory/anima_eh35dh/ . This is longer, but better. It should also help our search engine performance. Of course, the old URIs will still work and silently divert to the new address with a 301 redirect.

And that’s about it, I think.