As part of our ongoing quest to become the most amazingest website in all of the world, we’ve redesigned the footer of EdinburghMenus.com to make it more beautiful and to give more quick links to useful parts of the site.

But probably the most noticable difference is the addition of the Edinburgh - Inspiring Capital logo. We’re proud to be an Edinburgh-based website, rather than one of the many national or international consumer review sites you find cluttering up the internet. Our knowledge of Edinburgh is what makes us stand out from all those other websites that just rip all their business listings out of Thomson Local!

In other news 

We’ve tweaked a couple of other bits other site recently, to make navigating around the site a bit quicker and easier:

• If you search for a business and get exactly 1 match, rather than show you the search results, we’ll just send you straight to the listing for that business.
• If you hover over the link to a business anywhere on the site (eg. in the recent reviews on the home page) you’ll get a popup giving you a map and basic details about that business.
• We’ve added a list of similar businesses nearby below the map on the listing page for each business.

And that’s about it for now. More new features currently being worked on, as always! As ever, let us know if you have any comments on the new features or if there’s anything you’d like added.

One of our favourite features on EdinburghMenus.com is the ability to add a sketch to your review. It’s a bit of fun that makes reading reviews on the site more entertaining. We thought it would be fun to allow you to see exactly how people drew the sketches that people draw to accompany their reviews. This information has always been stored in our database but in the past has only been used to create the final image that you see on the site.

But not any more! Now, when you see a sketch beside a review, you can click on it and the canvas will clear and the sketch will redraw itself, exactly as its creator did originally - errors and all. Pretty pointless, but fun!

For the techies among you, this feature is brought to you by Adobe Flash and the jQuery JavaScript library. If you don’t have Flash and JavaScript enabled, you’ll still see the final static version of the sketch.

And so the sketch feature further extends its lead as the least used feature with the most development time spent on it…

It’s now possible to order and pay for food from some of the best takeaways in town without leaving your computer!

EdinburghMenus.com has partnered with just-eat.co.uk to provide this service. There are currently 13 businesses offering this service with more being added all the time. To order online, just click the “order online now” link on the listing page for that business on EdinburghMenus.com. You will then be directed to just-eat.co.uk’s secure online ordering system where you can choose what you want to eat and pay securely by credit card.

The businesses that offer online ordering through just-eat.co.uk have been tagged “justeat” and “orderonline” so you can search for them easily. Try searching for “justeat indian” near “Newington” (try it now) or “orderonline” near “the zoo” (try it now) to get an idea of how to find the business you want.

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!

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.

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!