Just a quick post to let you know about a couple of new things that have been added to the site in the last few days…

Another new search feature has been added to the site — map search allows you to just pan and zoom around the map of Edinburgh and every time you move, the markers will reload (ajaxtastically) showing the businesses in the current map view. This works best if you’re zoomed in quite far, so to keep it working nice and quick we’ve limited it to 15 markers on screen at once. If there are more than 15 businesses in the current view, the ones nearest the middle of the map are shown. By default, the map will show all businesses, but you can enter a search term to filter the results.

We’ve also added some extra tags for cafes, bars and restaurants in Edinburgh that have wifi and free wifi. So you can now search for things like “wifi pub” near “jeffrey street” (try it) or “free wifi” near “EH3 7BR” (try it). If you know of any other businesses offering wifi and/or free wifi, you can update the site yourself by logging in and editing a listing. To mark a business as having wifi, add the tag “wifi” to the tag list at the bottom of the edit business page. If the wifi is provided free of charge, add the tag “freewifi” as well.

Props to Richard Cross for providing the bulk of the data to enable this useful new feature.

Enjoy!

Ok, so we’ve been live for over a month now and despite the fact that we have the word “menus” in our name, there have been no menus on the site. Shocking. Please accept our sincere apologies.

But as of today, that has changed! It is now possible to add and edit menus for any business on the site. As with all of the business editing features, you need to be logged in to add or edit menus, and if you are not a trusted editor, any changes you make will be moderated before going live on the site. Unlike other sites that simply scan in menus for you to read on screen, all menus on EdinburghMenus.com are entered as normal text. So not only will the menus load quicker, they are easy to read, are accessible to the visually impaired and can be printed easily.

Once there are more menus on the site, we’ll add menu search features so you can search for a specific dish that you want to eat. You want to search for “spaghetti carbonara” near “clerk street”? Watch this space!

With almost a thousand businesses listed on the site, it’s going to take a while before each listing has a menu. We will be contacting business owners shortly giving them each a unique username and password so they can add and edit their own menus instantly.

This service is completely free for the business owners as well as for visitors to the site. If we charged for this, fewer businesses would use it; the site would be less useful; fewer people would visit; fewer reviews would be written; the site would become out of date and eventually our beloved EdinburghMenus.com would become yet another dead restaurant and takeaway guide cluttering up the internet — and we don’t want that!

We’ve added a few menus ourselves for a few businesses to check that the system works and to get the ball rolling (try La Garrigue, Rick Shaws or Zanzero). As with lots of things on the site, this feature is “work in progress”, so please let us know if you have any suggestions about how to improve it!

How often have you suggested to somebody that you meet for a coffee or some food at some point between where each of you live? And how often have you found it difficult to decide where is about halfway? And have you ever been going somewhere and wanted to stop for coffee or some food on the way but found it hard to think of what is en-route?

Well, to help you out in situations like this, we’ve come up with a new search tool - the between search. You just enter what you’re looking for and the two locations that you want to find places between. Just like the normal quick search on EdinburghMenus.com, the locations can be postcodes, streets, areas or even big Edinburgh landmarks.

On your way to the castle from your flat in Stockbridge and want to stop for coffee on the way? Just enter ‘cafe’, ‘castle’ and ’stockbridge’ into the between search. (try it). Live on Marchmont Road and want meet your friend from Leith for pizza somewhere in between? ‘Pizza’, ‘marchmont road’ and ‘leith’ will sort you out. (try it).

As always, search results are plotted on a GoogleMap. When you hover over a result, as well as displaying the most basic information about the business, you will also be shown how far that business is from the exact midpoint of the two locations you entered. Good for settling the occasional argument about who had to travel further to meet up!

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!

Reviews are great. But sometimes you can’t quite sum up all you feel about something with words alone, right? What’s that? Words are fine? Oh…

Well, anyway, at EdinburghMenus.com, we don’t think that words are always enough. So you can draw pictures to go with your reviews. Keep it clean please - I’m looking at you mdavidson. This is what mdavidson thinks the food looks like at Monster Mash on Thistle Street. Yet he still gave them 4 stars. Remind me not to go for dinner at his house…

Once we have a few more masterpieces like this on the site we’ll probably make some sort of a gallery of the best ones. Complete with gallery music à la Take Hart. Excellent. That’ll be something for you to look forward to.