The weeks of coding have happily paid off; Menuism is thrilled to present a Facebook application. Short of going out to eat with your friends, it’s the best way to share the dining experience. You can enjoy a fully integrated experience — all of the reviews you see on Menuism can be read on Facebook, and the review you write on Facebook will be hanging out on Menuism for everyone to see.

The coolest feature for the food-lover might be the GutCheck option on Facebook; write down that delicious dish you’re eating for all the world to see on your profile. If you’re eating something with truffles, we want to hear about it.

We’re the first application on Facebook related to dining out and food. Time to pause and reflect: the days where we all blindly followed one gourmet expert is long over. (Heck, we used our Zagat guides to smash gross-looking bugs long ago.) One step back for The Man, one leap forward for The Masses!

To play food critic, join us on the “Eating” application at http://apps.facebook.com/menuism.

Anne, Marketing Intern

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

Happy Holidays! We hope you’re spending some restful, quality time with those closest to you. We’re taking time to count our blessings, and one of the things we’re most grateful for is the wonderful response we’ve gotten from you, our awesome readers and users. Be it reviews, praise, comments, suggestions, or even outright criticism, we appreciate it all – Menuism wouldn’t be where it is without you.

Everyone celebrates differently (Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, etc.) during the holidays, but there’s one common theme that unites all revelers – eating! So whatever your celebration, we hope these holidays find you happy, healthy, well fed, and brimming with restaurant reviews just waiting to be written.

The coming year has lots of exciting things in store for Menuism – stay tuned!

-John and 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’re wondering what happened to the blog (the look and URL are different), we decided to stop hosting the blog ourself and move it over to wordpress.com.  The main reason behind this is so that we can focus all of our efforts and resources on menuism.com.

What does this mean to you?  Nothing really, but just for completeness:

• blog.menuism.com will still work and redirect you to menuism.wordpress.com
• Subscriptions to the RSS feed and email updates will continue to work since they’re through the FeedBurner URL – If you haven’t already, you should subscribe for updates.
• Menuism.com should have more room to grow now since it’s no longer sharing space with the blog
• We should have more time to make Menuism better since we’ll be fidgeting with the blog software less!

That’s all for now.  Back to work!  Let us know if you see any issues with the new blog.

- Justin

Service Status

Some of you may have noticed that there have been issues with the Gravatar service so people’s images haven’t been showing up properly. The service is undergoing a pretty major overhaul to accoomodate the growth and consequently the service is spotty and the new registrations and logins are currently unavailable.

What is Gravatar?

A gravatar is a 80×80 pixel image that you can use to visually represent yourself on the web. Use the same email address to create an account at www.gravatar.com. Upload a pic and once it’s approved it’ll automatically show up. You can use the same avatar image on any Gravatar-enabled website or blog. Just use the same email address and it will automatically show up. Gravatar uses MPAA-style ratings so that we can ensure only appropriate images show up on our site.

How We Use It

We cache the gravatars locally to speed up the load times since we saw that gravatar was having performance issues. The local cache is updated daily and we only use images that are rated PG or G. If you don’t have a gravatar, you’ll get the default baby Foodha image.

Where’s my Gravatar?

If you’re gravatar isn’t showing up, there’s a couple possible reasons:

• Your cached version hasn’t been updated yet – We update nightly but it only works if the Gravatar service itself is up. If it hasn’t shown up in awhile and the Gravatar service is up, send us a message and we’ll look into it.
• Your image is rated higher than G or PG – Sorry, we’re trying to keep the site somewhat family friendly. Please update your image at the Gravatar site to a tamer image.

We’ll continue to make the caching code more robust so we’re even more immune to the service issues.

Thanks for your patience.

- Justin