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 Is the site active, or does nobody ever visit and is all of the information out of date?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.

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.