Est Est Est on George Street recently rebranded and become Gusto. Est Est Est had a number of reviews on EdinburghMenus.com before the change. Some of these reviews were very comprehensive and made a pretty good read in their own right. As we’re still a pretty new site, this is the first time we’ve faced this dilemma. Now that the business has had a face lift, should we wipe the slate clean and remove the reviews and reset the rating for this business?

We’re not sure. What we’ve done is add a caveat to the top of each review to warn readers that the review was written before the business rebranded. That way visitors get to read the (informative and sometimes entertaining) reviews while also being made aware that the content does not necessarily reflect on the current state of the business.

Is this the right approach? Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment here or by contacting us.

We recently ran our site against YSlow (the Firefox add-on for Firebug by Yahoo!) and it flagged up a few ways that we could speed up our site. So we’ve implemented the changes that it suggested (moving all links to JavaScript files to the bottom of each page, adding far future expire headers to all static content and minified all of our JavaScript).

And what a difference! The first time you visit the site, there won’t be that much of a difference, but once you have grabbed all the static files that are reused on each page, thanks to the far future expire headers, subsequent page loads as you move through the site should be noticably quicker than before.

In other news, there’s a big change to the site that we’re in the final stages of sorting out - hopefully we’ll be able to tell you all about it next week!

EdinburghMenus.com has now adopted the jQuery javascript library for adding trendy new functionality and effects to the site. This is slowly going to replace other little snippets of javascript we have written for the site.

jQuery is going to enable us to add fancy new features to the site more rapidly and with more cross-browser compatability. For example, we were aware of some problems with our help pop-ups not displaying properly on version 2 of Safari on OS X. Our new jQuery based help popups should sort this problem out, as well as being a bit fancier in general.

To match our fancy new help pop-ups, we’ve replaced the generic AJAX spinner with a fancy new EdinburghMenus.com one. Our site is pretty snappy, so you will probably only ever see a flash of this when waiting for search results or popup help text. But if you are ever kept waiting for a few seconds, watching our little marker bounce happily away will hopefully make the wait more enjoyable!

Well, it’s taken us a little over 4 months, but EdinburghMenus.com has now passed the 500 review milestone! Thanks so much to everybody who has contributed to the site. We love reading and writing the reviews on the site as much as visitors to the site obviously do and have discovered a host of great new places to eat in Edinburgh as a result.

Now that we have a decent amount of reviews to provide a reliable study, we can confirm what we have all known for a long time - Edinburgh’s restaurants, cafes, takeaways and bars are mainly great. In fact, out of the 526 reviews currently on the site, 30% of them rate the business as 4/5 (great).

A further 24% of reviews rate the business as 3.5/5 (good), 11% as 4.5/5 (superb) and 7% as 5/5 (perfect).

13.5% of the current reviews on EdinburghMenus.com rate the business as mediocre or worse, so still some room for improvement!

On EdinburghMenus.com, it’s really easy to find businesses located close to where you are — you can enter an Edinburgh postcode, street name, area or city landmark.

You may think that such functionality is very straightforward to implement but that is not necessarily the case, certainly not in the UK.

In the UK the Post Office owns the postcode data and sells that information to people who need it. There is an attempt to produce a public domain version of that data, but that is going to take a while. In order to get around this, EdinburghMenus.com used to approximate the location of a postcode by comparing it with a postcode for one of the over 800 businesses we have in our database. This wasn’t ideal, as it didn’t give an entirely accurate location, but it was quick and, most importantly free. Then Google enabled UK geocoding in their GoogleMaps API and all was well — you could send a UK postcode to Google and they would return the precise coordinates for that location.

But how did Google get around the licensing implications of UK postcodes and give away this data to web developers for free? Well, it looks like they didn’t — as of the middle of last week, geocoding a UK postcode with the GoogleMaps API no longer works. Hummmph. It looks as if it was a mistake on Google’s part to enable it in the first place.

As a result of this, locating postcodes was broken for a while on EdinburghMenus.com. We have now found an alternative solution from Emad Fanous which is working well so far, although it is not quite as quick as the Google solution. We’ve also adapted our code so that if Google ever do re-enable their UK postcode Geocoding, the system will use that instead and if Emad Fanous’ version stops working, the site will revert to approximating postcodes from data within our own database.