Users can keep track of their food and dining experiences with greater ease

You may have noticed some changes when you logged in to your Menuism.com account recently, right? Brighter colors, a few buttons in different places? We’re really excited about this redesign – but not because of the colors changes! We actually did this redesign so that users, like you, can keep track and recall your dining experiences more easily.

Obviously you already know that Menuism.com is the largest compilation of menus on the web and that we are more detailed than other restaurant sites – especially since we encourage you to rate and review both the restaurant and the specific dishes that you ate. Now, however, we are taking this to a new level with a new “dining journal” feature.

A dining journal? What’s that?

So glad you asked! The dining journal emulates a Roladex filled with restaurant business cards. The idea is that when you have a business card, you would write short notes on it, like ‘Ask for Bob’ or ‘Delicious lasagna!’ But with Menuism.com’s new design, you can write as much as you want and always refer back to your notes and photos when you want to remember what you thought about that restaurant.

And now all of your reviews and photos will be in this one online “dining journal.” You can search the journal to find all past reviews of one particular restaurant by searching for that restaurant, but you can also search based on cuisine, tag, or description. If you’re looking for Chinese food one night, search “Chinese” and all of the restaurants you reviewed that are tagged “Chinese” will come up in your search.

Because of this new design and simple search feature, you’ll never forget what you thought of a particular restaurant – and particular menu items. Plus your reviews will now appear at the top of each restaurant’s page, making it much easier for you to recall your experiences. You’ll be able to use your reviews for your own benefit!

We really want you to be able to use Menuism.com as a one-stop shop for all things restaurant-related. And we are really excited about our redesign! We hope you like it as much as we do.

Happy eating!
The Menuism Team

They dined, they wrote and were voted the most helpful.  Congratulations to our top 3 winners for July’s Menuism Restaurant Reviewer Contest. Between the 3 of them, they garnered a total of 149 helpful votes.  Wow!  This trio definitely knows their stuff and apparently, many of you agreed and this is actually CheapEthnicEatz’s showing up in the top 3.  If she could do it, you could, too.  Hat’s off to them and if you’d like to keep up with their reviews, check out their profiles below.

girlmostlikley from Rancho Cucamonga, CA

CheapEthnicEatz from Montreal, Quebec, Canada

coolsreek from Corona, CA

As you can see, all three of our winners also received some prize money and if you’d like a chance to compete, than be sure to click this link to get more info on the September Menuism Restaurant Reviewer Contest. Good luck and maybe, in a month, we’ll be announcing you as winner as well.

Hey everyone! Just a quickie post to let you know that Menuism has a Facebook Page and is also on Twitter and we’d love to connect with as many of you as we can.  Please see links below.

Fan Menuism on Facebook

Follow Menuism on Twitter

Follow Menuism Co-Founder, Justin Chen, on Twitter

Follow Community Manager, Abby Abanes, on Twitter

By the way, if you decide to follow us on Twitter, please let us know that you’re a member of Menuism, so that we could follow you back as well!

Did you know that I had a burrito and pizza last night? And that I followed it up with a banana?

You would if you checked out my Menuism GutChecks. GutChecks are a lightweight way for you to track what you’re eating at all times. If it’s something at home or a light snack, just type it in and update your GutCheck. Or if you just ate out at a restaurant, write a review and a GutCheck will automatically get created for you.

Updating

There are a few easy ways to update your GutChecks:

• On the top right corner there’s always a section that says what you’re currently eating along with an “Update” link. Just click that and a form will show up.
• On the right-hand side of your dashboard, there’s directions for a link you can drag to your browser’s bookmark bar that says “I’m Eating…”. Just click that to update your status from wherever you’re browsing.
• If you have a Twitter account, your GutChecks can be automatically imported after you link your Twitter account to your Menuism account (do this on your settings page). For example, anytime I update my Twitter status (see image below) with “ate”, “eat” or “eating”, Menuism automatically updates my GutCheck eating status. Check out the coverage on on Mashable.

Sharing

What good is updating your eating status if you can’t share it? The easiest way to share it is with our image widget that get’s constantly refreshed with your latest GutCheck. My widget is shown in the top right. You can also see mine and John’s on the Menuism MySpace page . Just check the right hand side of your dashboard for the code to copy into your webpage or blog.

So what are you waiting for? Let us in your belly and see what you’re eating!

Justin

Some of you might have noticed that things look pretty different on Menuism. We’ve been listening hard to your feedback and decided to give the site a facelift for the better. Menuism is all about helping you eat better, and one of the biggest goals of the update was to give a lot more focus to users and how they related to each other and the restaurants they dine at. Here’s a quick tour:

• Left Context / Action / Menu Bar
  • The top part of the left menu column is the context data. On a city, user, or restaurant’s page, you can expect to see a snapshot of relevant information here.
  • Right under the pages that have a context box, there might be an action button section. These are the important actions you can take on that page. If you don’t know what to do, look there.
  • The Menu Bar has a bunch of colored tabs that show you what kind of content is available to you.
• Header
  • We tried to clean up the header a little bit and make search a little more straight-forward. You can easily hit the restaurant, food, and user search from the top.
  • On the top right, you’ll always have quick access to your home, try list and settings. When in doubt, just click on your own pretty picture!
• Content
  • The content is a bit more organized now. You’ll notice that things are more contained and many of the boxes have a link on the top right to either go to a more detailed page or take action.

This is only the start. There will be more changes and optimizations rolled out, but we wanted to get the basic layout change out so everyone could start playing with it. If you’ve got feedback or more ideas, let us know!

Stay tuned for more exciting announcements.

-Justin & John

Yes, the day we’ve been waiting for all month is finally upon us! This week is National Pancake Week, and specifically, today is National Pancake Day, which you might know better as Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras.

To celebrate this wondrous day of fluffly, griddle-cooked batter, IHOP is giving away one free shortstack of pancakes today. More details here, and here are some quick links to find them in the following areas:

• Seattle
• Chicago
• New York
• San Francisco

What better way to celebrate National Pancake Week and participate in the ongoing Food Fight than by enjoying some free flapjacks? If plain buttermilk pancakes aren’t your thing, you can try lots of other specialty pancakes that users have already found. There are still lots of pancakes to eat (and reviews to write) for this Food Fight – get crackin’!

-John

Quick Reminder: Write reviews to enter the end of month t-shirt drawing!

At the end of the month, we’ll be giving away a free Menuism t-shirt to one of Foodha’s Picks. If you haven’t noticed yet, Foodha randomly picks a top tipped review over the past 30 days to display on the front page (since he likes food so much, the review has to include a review of the food). On January 1st, we’ll load up the front page of Menuism and see who the random winner is (excluding John and Justin of course – we already have shirts ).

Right now, the users that look to be in the running are:

• Shaomai
• Mandeelish
• Mirabell_19

If you don’t want to write reviews but you want a t-shirt, then buy one at the Menuism Shop. We also have dark gray hoodies now too, but they aren’t up on the page yet. Send us an email if you want one of those.

Some tips on getting tipped:

• After you write a review, click on the “Share” link on the review confirmation page to send it to your friends or the people you dined with. Tell them to join to tip you!
• Invite your friends to join the site so they can keep track of all your recent reviews.
• Good reviews don’t just mean reviews with high ratings. Make sure your review is useful, helpful, and/or entertaining.

If you enjoy the review, give it a tip! ‘Tis the season for giving afterall

Happy Eating,

Justin