foodha for thought - menuism blog

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

It’s been quiet on this blog lately, but for good reason – we’ve been hard at work making small (and not-so-small) changes all over the site. Many of these changes come directly from your feedback, so thank you, and keep it coming!

Reviews

• Wrote a review, but made a typo? You can now edit the text bodies of your reviews and accompanying menu item reviews. Just go to your reviews list on your user homepage and click on the offending block of text to make your fix.
• While you’re looking at all your beautiful reviews, you might notice that they’re now sortable by the most recent reply – this makes it easy to quickly respond to the whims of your adoring fans.

Users

• User search: we’ve added a simple user search capability to the site. Just click on the checkbox in the search header to find a user, and enter their screen name or first name. Enter their city and state, or leave the location box blank to search across the whole site. Now it’s super easy to find your friends and favorite reviewers!
• Profile customization: show the world who you are! On your user homepage you can now add a custom tagline, website url and personal description which are visible to all users. I challenge you to come up with a better tagline than Justin’s – “living to eat is much more fun”.

Invites

• It’s great to see that people are using the invite feature to share the site with their friends, but the feedback loop wasn’t fully complete, until now. Now when the friends you invite join the site, two things happen:
  1. You get an confirmation email with the great news.
  2. Your friend automatically becomes your fan (on the site). Who wouldn’t be a fan of your beautiful self?

Design

• New front page: what do you think? We pulled out the user lists to better recognize both the best tippers and reviewers and rearranged things to increase the educational effectiveness of the page.
• New restaurant pages: we hope the smoother layout and new nifty little graphics help you navigate the restaurant pages more easily. Writing a review and voting for the menu usefulness has never been easier!

In addition to these features we’ve also made a lot of under-the-cover changes and fixes to keep things running quickly and smoothly for your food-finding enjoyment. Let us know what you think of the changes, and keep spreading the word!

-John

p.s. If you’re curious about the other thing that’s kept us busy lately, you can read about it on our business blog.

Just a couple updates.

1. View all reviews at http://www.menuism.com/reviews. Just a fun way to view all the reviews ever written. Shows the user and the number of tips they’ve received for the review. We’ll probably add some sorting capabilities to this, so let us know what you’d like to see.
2. Updated city page Julie helped us revamp the city page design so it looks much cleaner. Let us know if you have some design suggestions or if you’d like to see certain content up there.

Other minor things:

1. Your cities under the search bar If you haven’t noticed yet, there are links to the city pages under the search bar. Before they were just top cities but now they include the cities that you have stored location for. Just a quick shortcut to see what’s going on locally. Oh, and if you haven’t tried it yet and you’re bored, try out the raNDom link. It’s fun to see where you end up and see what they’re eating (well, I think it’s fun).
2. Menu last updated On the restaurant page, there’s a little notice saying when the last time an item was added or edited just so you can tell if the menu’s been getting any love recently (thanks Sara).
3. Fixed some minor nuisances with signup Hopefully you’ve already created an account.. (thanks PhilosopherK and Risto)
4. Fixed stars issue for review in IE Hopefully they should work fine now. Let us know if they don’t. (thanks takeru)
5. Review form is less confusing …hopefully. (thanks methodrider)

Thanks to all for the feedback so far. We’re still going through it all while working on some other things along the way. Keep it coming!

- Justin

Now that we’ve gotten this blog up it’s time to put it to good use. Today we did a first pass at all your wonderful feedback and fixed a number of nagging issues. I won’t list all of them here, but there are two that are worth mentioning (and trying out):

1. streamlining menu item adding. we’ve smoothed out the menu item addition form, so it’s much easier to add a single dish to a menu (or even multiple in succession).
2. restaurant pages now show existing reviews when there are no items on the menu, so there’s something to see. (we’d love your opinion on this behavior – see the end of this post)

Big thanks to bluerhapsodies, liksani, jetleigh, chilumba, rags, jdogg, and billyd94 for bringing these and the other issues we fixed to our attention! If you’ve sent feedback, don’t worry, we’ll definitely get to it. =)

I’ve also noticed that some users are using the Gravatar system with their user accounts – they look awesome, and really brighten up the reviews. If you haven’t tried it out, I’d encourage you to check out Gravatar when you get the chance.

So regarding the #2 fix above: which do you prefer to see first on a restaurant page: the menu or the reviews? We’re torn on this and we’d like to know what you think.

That’s all for now. Keep up the great usage and feedback!

-John