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.

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.

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.

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.

Online review sites with a user added reviews are tricky things. How do you know that the reviews on the site are in any way authentic? Who’s to say that the good reviews weren’t added by the business owners signing up as loads of different people and that the bad reviews weren’t added by their competitors doing the same? The truth is, you never know 100%. But here at EdinburghMenus.com, we’ve built lots of systems and procedures into the site to make sure the reviews are as trustworthy as possible while keeping it nice and easy for people to add reviews.

There are a few ways that we do this, the most obvious being our policy of manually checking reviews submitted by guests and new users. Once a new user has written a couple of (sensible!) reviews, they will be upgraded to “reviewer” status and thereafter their reviews will immediately go live on the site.

But EdinburghMenus.com is a site that relies first and foremost on its users to provide the content, and it therefore also makes sense that the site’s users also contribute to maintaining the authenticity and usefulness of reviews on the site. That is why, when you are logged in, below every review on the site there are a series of dropdown selectors. These dropdowns allow you to say whether you found the review useful or not; whether or not you agree with it and whether you found it funny or boring. The number in brackets after each dropdown gives the current “score” for each moderation category.

Every time you select something from one of these dropdowns, the EdinburghMenus.com machine reevaluates how trustworthy it deems that review (and its author) based on how other users have moderated the comment and adjusts its position accordingly. If a review is constantly being marked as not useful or people are overwhelmingly disagreeing with a review, it may be removed. Unfortunately, no matter how boring a review is regarded, so long as it appears trustworthy, it will stay! Other factors that affect how trustworthy a review is regarded include the number of reviews left by that user, the user level of that user and whether or not they have confirmed their email address.

Of course, to prevent abuse of the system, you can’t moderate your own reviews or moderate the same review by another user more than once. To ensure that people don’t sign up as a few different people and systematically moderate up the reviews for each user, the system will keep an eye out for such tomfoolery and those guilty will have their reviews removed, be banned from the site and generally given a jolly good ticking off.

I’m not going to patronise you by explaining to you what RSS feeds are. If you’re reading the development blog of a “Web 2.0″ kind of web site, I reckon there’s a fair chance that you’re down with the whole syndication thing.

So I’ll just use this post to tell you a bit about the implementation of RSS on EdinburghMenus.com and a couple of neat little things about them that you might not have noticed…

Our basic RSS feed contains the most recent reviews written on the site. There is also a custom feed for every business showing the most recent reviews written about that business. And finally, every registered user has their own RSS feed showing the most recent reviews written by them. You can grab these customised feeds from the listing page for any business or the profile page of any user.

Now something you might not have noticed — our RSS feeds contain embedded geographical data about the business. This means that not only can you view the RSS feeds in your newsreader, or whatever, as normal, you can also do clever stuff with the coordinates in the feed to display the reviews on a map. To quickly and easily see this in action, look what happens when you just paste the entire URI of a feed into a Google Maps search.

If there are any other feeds you’d like us to make available (perhaps newest businesses on the site or the current highest rated businesses), just let us know — EdinburghMenus.com is constantly in development and we’ll happily implement new features that our users will find useful.

EdinburghMenus.com now supports microformats.

In brief, microformats consist of snippets of information hidden within the code of a webpage written in a way that computers can understand. Software can pick up on this hidden code and identify information about reviews, businesses and people mentioned on a web site. The idea is that this will make it easier to generate links between different web sites and services and be a way to link up all the disparate information that can be found on the internet.

To be honest, this is of limited use just now, as current browsers don’t pay any attention to this extra information, unless you have installed a microformats extension to a good browser. But hopefully within the next couple of years, microformats will be as ubiquitous around the web as RSS feeds are today. The next major release of Firefox is going to incorporate support for them and it can only be a matter of time before the major search engines wise up too.

EdinburghMenus.com now uses the hReview standard for all reviews on the site and all business listings have an hCard hidden behind the scenes. Reviewers are also tagged with an hCard, but don’t panic — we don’t give away any more information about you via microformats than is already available on screen.

Apologies non-geeks — I’ll try to make the next post more interesting!

With sites like EdinburghMenus.com, it can be hard to know how much is really going on in the site by just looking at the home page. Is the site active, or does nobody ever visit and is all of the information out of date?

Since we launched the site (all those days ago) we’ve had a “recent reviews” panel on the home page. This is great as you can see immediately whether or not there is any activity on the site and it gives the visitor somewhere to go to as soon as they visit. And if the reviewer did a sketch to go with their review, something nice to look at on the front page too.

But there is more happening at EdinburghMenus.com than just restaurant and takeaway reviews (although they are the most interesting bit). People are signing up, editing business listings, adding menus and photos, adding whole new businesses and confirming that details for listings are correct. So, inspired by our favourite social networking site, the home page now has a News Feed on it, telling you who’s been doing what on the site and when.

Shy? Don’t want your reviews and site edits paraded in front of everybody on the home page? If an item in the news feed relates to something you have contributed to the site, a “Delete” link will appear beside it. Just click the link and the item will disappear from the news feed.

Remember, the site is still in active development, so if you have any suggestions for improvements to this feature, or any ideas for anything else to improve the site, please leave a comment here or send us a message!

Welcome to the first post on the EdinburghMenus.com blog!

EdinburghMenus.com has been in development for over a year now. What started as a small experiment with the new (at the time) GoogleMaps API and as means of learning PHP/MySQL has developed into a full-blown restaurant and takeaway guide for Edinburgh with a big emphasis on user generated content.

Development has taken a while as there’s been so much to learn in the process. Ever increasing ambitions for the site; desires to incorporate more and more complex features and the sheer scale of the project have taken their toll!

But the site is nearly finished! The site in its current state is now live. It is certainly not finished and there are undoubtedly bugs to be squished, creases to be ironed out and rough edges to be… erm… unroughened.

So please, get involved! The site is here to be used - have a look around, write some reviews, edit some listings, mark your favourite businesses, invite your friends. You don’t have to sign up to write reviews on the site, but to edit listings you do. Sign up soon while the short usernames are still available!

Hopefully I’ll find time at least once a week to post here about the site. If you have any comments, complaints or feature requests, please leave a comment or get in touch - we’d love to here from you.