Statistics are great, no matter how misleading they may be at times.

There is an ever increasing amount of data on the EdinburghMenus.com database and we thought it would be interesting to generate some statistics based on that wealth of information.

The statistics page currently shows information about members like who has written the most reviews, the longest reviews and who is considered the most trustworthy by the system.

Statistics about businesses show which businesses have the most reviews, where has been rated highest and where the lowest. The statistics for best and worst rated businesses only take into account businesses with more that 2 reviews. Once there are more reviews on the site this will be changed to show only businesses with more than 5 reviews, to make the results more reliable.

To see all this in action, visit the review statistics page.

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.

Well, we thought that we’d already made searching for restaurants and takeaways in Edinburgh about as easy as it could get.

Not according to Mystic. He’s been a keen EdinburghMenus.com user since our launch and he suggested that we create a Firefox search plugin so that he can search EdinburghMenus.com without actually going to the site first.

So we did. To add the EdinburghMenus.com search plugin, while on any EdinburghMenus.com page, just click the little dropdown beside the search field at the top of Firefox and select Add ‘EdinburghMenus.com’. Try it right now. You are using Firefox, right?!

Job done.

Now you can search for a business name or type of business and it will load up the results page just as if you’d entered the term into the “What” box on the EdinburghMenus.com site. If you want to see businesses near you, it will also accept an EH post code.

The perfect accessory for the beautiful summer we are all enjoying this year - an EdinburghMenus.com branded umbrella!

To help get the word out on the street that we exist and to encourage more people to sign up and contribute reviews to the site, we are now offering EdinburghMenus.com branded umbrellas to any Edinburgh resident who signs up to the site and writes and least 10 reviews. As soon as you’ve written 10 reviews, contact us and we’ll sort you out. While stocks last!

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.

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!

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.