foodha for thought - menuism blog

One of the hardest things about writing reviews is simply remembering what you need to review.

Cheesesteak fan and Menuism user Dynamyk had a practical idea for keeping track of which restaurants to review - automating a link to any restaurant mentioned in a Gutcheck. If you’re twittering what you’re doing all day long, this is an easy way to further record your dining experiences.

See It In Action

We’re often able to match the restaurant you’ve typed into Twitter with its corresponding profile on Menuism.

But if there are multiple matches, or possible matches, we’ll provide a link to a search for the restaurant, so you’re able to identify the exact location.

How To Do It (It’s Easy!)

In your Gutcheck, you’ll want to format your Twitter as follows:

1. write “at” or “from” in front of the restaurant name (example: “ate at Food Hut” or “ate a burger from Food Hut”…)
2. “in” in front of the city (example: “ate a burger at Food Hut in Los Angeles”)

More Examples

I’ve highlighted the key terms to include to help us match.

If you’re using direct Gutchecks on the Menuism site:

• at sushisamba in new york, ny
• chicken sandwich from chickfila in irvine, ca

Gutchecks via Twitter - be sure to include “eat”, “ate” or “eating” at the beginning of your tweet.

If you’re on Twitter, you can link your account by entering your Twitter screenname on your Menuism settings page.

Let me know if you have any feedback or other suggestions!

Justin

Mothers can be so stereotypical, such as when they look worried when you so much as sneeze, or when they tell you to drive carefully. Mother’s Day is, in part, a celebration of those stereotypes and how our mothers can be downright silly when it comes to their children.
These are universal themes. But what about mothers across the country? Where do you get an East Coast mom the best chowder, or the best guacamole for the San Francisco mother? We’ve looked to our users to find out.
Get in the car and take your mother to one of these fancy places to say thanks for all they’ve done and all they’ll continue to do – and if she grips the door handle and says, “Slow down, slow down,” this one time, at least, you should do it without sighing.

The Boston Mom

Your mom took you to the Boston Children’s Museum when you were young, and happily drove you on college visits to what seemed like every single college in Massachusetts. Hey, how about taking her to a restaurant? That’d be wicked cool. Try Union Oyster House, and thank her for all she’s done for you while she destroys some fresh lobster.

The New York Mom

Get her what she really wants: a perfectly grilled Porterhouse at the famous Peter Luger Steak House. Order some broccoli on the side to make her happy; no matter how old you are, you’ve still got to eat your vegetables.

The San Francisco Mom

Tear your mom away from her pottery wheel and yoga mat and scoot over to Maya. If you or your mother are vegetarian, don’t fear; there’s food for you, and more importantly, more guacamole than you can shake a lamb’s tail at.
Otherwise, try the piramida de res, consisting of hanger steak, grilled tomatoes, sautéed onions, a black bean puree, and a chile vinaigrette.

Nothing says, “I love you, Mom,” more than vertical food.

The Chicago Mom

How many times did your mother take you to the Shedd Aquarium during that phase in your childhood when you ate lots of tuna fish sandwiches and insisted you were going to be a marine biologist? Say thanks with a Prince Edward Island Mussels served with smoked sausage at Sweets & Savories. For an entrée, check out the Mediterranean Seafood Stew.

The Washington D.C. Mom

How many mothers can looking perfectly at ease eating pizza in cashmere & pearls? Bet your mom can. Take her to 2 Amys and order a meal as quirky and fantastic as she is. How about pizza with garlic and anchovies with deviled eggs on the side?

Where’s the place in your town that just seems to yell, “Mom, you were right all along”? Leave us a comment.

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

Want to keep track of the latest reviews on Menuism? Try out using the RSS feeds. Keep your eye out for the RSS icon and add the link to your favorite RSS feed reader. At this time, we’ve got a few different feeds:

• All Reviews: If you want to know who’s eating what no matter where, grab this one: http://www.menuism.com/reviews/feed
• Cities: If you want to just keep track of what’s going on around your city, grab one of these. Some examples:
  • http://www.menuism.com/cities/US/IL/Chicago/reviews/feed
  • http://www.menuism.com/cities/US/WA/Seattle/reviews/feed
  • http://www.menuism.com/cities/US/CA/San+Francisco/reviews/feed
• Users: If you want to keep tabs on a particular user, grab the feed from their user page. For example, on my profile page, the RSS feed for all my reviews is: http://www.menuism.com/users/justin/reviews/feed
• Friends: If you just care about where your friends are eating, grab the feed link on your “Friends” page. For example, on my friends page the RSS feed for my friends is: http://www.menuism.com/users/justin/reviews/friends/feed

If you don’t have an RSS reader yet, here are few you can try:

• Bloglines: A web-based RSS reader
• My Yahoo!: The Yahoo! start page can include RSS feeds as a content module. More info here.
• Google Reader: Google’s version of a web-based RSS reader
• Vienna: (Mac) A downloadable RSS reader so you can sync your feeds then read them offline.
• Firefox: You can use the Firefox browser to keep track of RSS feeds through “live bookmarks”. Menuism also looks better if you use Firefox or Camino (on Mac).
• More top feed readers here

Here’s Feedburner’s Feeds 101 guide if you want to read more about RSS feeds.

Go grab a feed to keep up on the food!

Leave a comment if you have a RSS reader recommendation for others or an RSS suggestion.
Justin

Now that you’ve found a restaurant you want to go to, what do you do? Glad you asked! You’ll notice that we now have a Utensils section on each restaurant page. These are the tools you can use to start eating at the restaurant.

• Directions - This will open a Google map of the restaruants address. Just put in your starting address and get going!
• Reserve - This will take you to the restaurant’s OpenTable webpage to search for open reservation times. Reservations made online are instantly confirmed and show up at the restaurant too. You’ll need to sign up for an OpenTable account, but doing so will let you accrue OpenTable Dining Rewards points to get free gift certificates. Online reservations are only available for restaurants that use the OpenTable system, so keep an eye out for the OpenTable tag.
• Share - Want to send the restaurants to your friends? Clicking on share will open your default email program so you can email your friends. If you use web-based mail and need to change the default email program: here for gmail, here for yahoo, here for hotmail.

Let us know if you have any other ideas to help you start eating!

Justin

Happy December to all you hungry readers! The new month brings lots of updates at Menuism (plus the huge backlog of blog posts about them), and one of the most exciting is the ability to upload your own profile image.

How do you do it? Just go to your user homepage and look for “Change Pic” under your current picture.

What about using Gravatar, you might ask? We were initially excited about using their simple service for user avatars, but technical issues on their side have closed off the service to new users. With all the great new users joining the site, we didn’t want everyone to wait any longer, so we chose to implement our own system. Maybe one day we’ll reconsider Gravatar, but our priority is to ensure a good experience for you, our loyal users.

We just added the image feature very recently and we’ve already seen great adoption by lots of users. It just takes a minute - if you haven’t uploaded an image yet, there’s no better time than now.

-John

Since opening up a few weeks ago, Menuism’s been growing steadily thanks to positive buzz around features like Yahoo! Sign In and the ability to rate what you ate. Today we got another great publicity boost - we were added to the Yahoo! directory!

Even cooler, we were highlighted as a “new and notable” site, which has helped bring lots of visitors closer to the wisdom of Foodha. With today’s boost, we’ve passed a milestone of 400 registered users! Hooray, or more aptly, Yahoo!

Returning users have probably noticed a big change on the front page. The big stars and “rate what you ate” button make it easy for anyone to start writing a review, which we’ll cover in depth in a future post.

Additionally, we’re proud to introduce Foodha’s Picks, which show off reviews that are beautiful examples of how users rate what they ate. How can your review get chosen? Simple, just write a review:

• that rates what you ate (include one or more menu items)
• that other users love (receives lots of tips)

That’s it! New Foodha’s Picks are being chosen constantly - your very next review could be one. And what do you get for getting a Foodha’s Pick? Let’s just say that you have our deepest appreciation, and possibly more in the future (once we think of something). Any suggestions?

-John

If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve added the ability to sign up and log into Menuism with your Yahoo! account. And we’re happy to say that since we implemented it on Oct 20th, we’ve had almost 70% of new users use the Yahoo Sign In approach. I hope that means people are finding it easy and useful.

Why?

• We think we’ve got a pretty cool service, but if people don’t signup then how can they get the full experience? The Yahoo! authentication lets people signup without having to create another username/password to remember and also ensures that it’s a person with a valid Yahoo account that’s signing up.
• Yahoo has more than 250 million users (from what I last saw) which means there’s quite a few people who are eligible to signup.

How do I use it to sign up?

1. Click on the big Yahoo! Sign In icon that my wonderful cousin Julia designed for us. Clicking on it will take you to Yahoo to sign in.

   

2. Sign into your Yahoo! account.
3. Click “Yes” to the agreement. After this, it will take you back to Menuism to finish the signup process.
4. Pick a screenname. Yahoo doesn’t send us your screenname, so you need to pick some kind of identification for the site.
5. Enter a valid email. Just in case we need to send you important account information. If you’re email is invalid and the signup email you send you bounces, we’ll invalidate your account (so use your real email).
6. Agree to the Terms of Use.
7. Done! Now everytime you want to sign into Menuism, just click on the Yahoo button and sign into your yahoo account when prompted (you’ll have to accept that agreement everytime) and you’ll automatically get signed into Menuism!

If you’ve signed up with the Yahoo Sign In and you don’t want to use it everytime, you can still set a password by going to “Edit Settings” on your home page. Now you can use your screenname and password to sign into Menuism which is a tad bit faster.
Questions

• Is this secure? Yes.
• Does Yahoo send any of my account information to Menuism? No. Yahoo doesn’t send us anything about you. All Yahoo tells us is “A user with a Yahoo account has successfully signed in and here’s a unique number you can use to identify him/her”.
• Do you send any information to Yahoo? No.

More Details For the Truly Curious

How did you do this? We used a cool new service that Yahoo made available called Yahoo BBAuth (Browser Based Authentication). We also leveraged a Ruby on Rails plugin that made the implementation rather smooth (Thanks Cameron!).

If you’ve got any more questions or have any problems, just send us some feedback or just leave a comment here.

-Justin

To help even more in the restaurant decision making process, we’ve added some Fun, but Optional survey questions to the review form to help users express even more information about their dining experience. Right now, we’ve got 3 questions around the areas of ambience, cost, and service. However, instead of taking the rating or score approach, we decided to phrase the questions in survey form - all you have to do it pick an answer. Here are the current questions and answers, along with a screenshot of the new form:

• Ambience: I came here for
  • a business meeting - more professional setting, somewhere you can talk and look respectable
  • a romantic date - a little on the quieter side with a more intimate setting
  • a family meal - pretty casual and you can bring your kids
  • fun with friends - a lively atmosphere that’s more accomodating to larger and louder groups
  • a meal on the go - not much of a dining atmosphere, either you come here just to eat or you get it to go
• Cost: My share of the meal was
  • Less than $10
  • Between $10 and $25
  • Between $25 and $50
  • More than $50
• Service: I tipped (or would have)
  • Less than 15% - subpar
  • Between 15% and 18% - average
  • More than 18% - better than expected

While the bucketed answers constrain you a little in choice, they offer a more descriptive answer than “Ambience:4 stars” or “Cost:5 stars” because those ratings are subjective. I might think $15 dollars deserves 5 stars for cost while someone else might think it’s 1 star.

Hopefully this additional information helps you both describe your experience more accurately and decide which places suit your needs. Let us know if you have any other ideas to improve the decision making process.

- Justin