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