Editing Restaurant and New Restaurants

Despite how cool Dineries looks, we are actually a very small group of people all with full time jobs. Such so, we really need the help of our Dinerians to help out on the site to maintain the site. So order to build and maintain the restaurants, we have and plan on continue to build out features for you Dinerians to submit information to us.

So here we go! The long awaited editing existing restaurants and submitting of new restaurants. Now on existing restaurants you will see this new link.



To submit a new restaurant to us, use the link found in our updated footer called "Submit Restaurant"

OpenMenu and Twitter Bootstrap

We recently came across the service OpenMenu at openmenu.com. They have standardized a menu format which many restaurants are using. There is a lot of work to be desired in this area of menus and they have a great start. What this means to us, is more menus online, which we have embedded from openmenu!



Dineries have upgraded the underlying CSS framework making use of Bootstrap from Twitter. What does that mean? Basically you'll see a more unified look, pretty buttons, and prettier message boxes. All in all, not much has changed on the user side, but things are considerably different and hopefully will speed up development for the future.
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

Restaurant Twitter Feeds

The restaurant business along with just about any other business has been expanding it's presence on the internet. When I first starting working with restaurants on the web, only a small percentage of them even had a website. Now more than 50% of restaurants have a website. Now some are jumping onto twitter, especially with the food trunk craze over the past few years. As another way to makes dineries a better place for all things restaurant, we've added a feature to display the twitter feeds of restaurants.

We're planning on integrating the food trunks into dineries and this will come in handy for those as well as seeing other promotions any restaurant may be doing.

Displaying Submitter Credit When Credit's Due

We think credit is should be supplied where credit is due. At dineries we try to care, unfortunately there are too many things to care about. But giving our users credit is one thing that's important to us. We've been keeping track of who as submitted what, and now we're starting to display them. We are still building a lot of the infrastructure and adding restaurant data, but pretty soon, we'll be adding cool user features like better search and sorting.

Dineries gets a boost

Hi everybody.

Dineries has a boost in traffic as it is now the new home of sporq.com. Sporq has been around on the internet since 2006 but after some great years and partners dropping out, sporq has officially shut its doors, for now...

Anyway, I want to welcome all the sporq users to dineries.com. We hope you like it here and we will try our best to deliver a even better product than sporq. I (andrew) am actually one of the founding members of sporq and now i'm trying to continue on with my vision with my new team.

In addition, we have optimized dineries at the core levels and it runs about 4X faster! Enjoy the speed and don't get whiplash.

Homepage Benchmark
Restaurant Page Benchmark

Restaurant.com Gift Certificates

So in our quest to provide the most comprehensive and complete restaurant website. We have started providing restaurant.com gift certificates links to any restaurant features discounted gift certificates there. If you are looking at a restaurant why wouldn't you want to save some money? Read the restriction before you buy though! We'll post information about any promotions that restaurant.com is running to save even more money.

Improved Menu Zooming

Been a while, but believe me there has been a lot of work on the backend side of dineries, including a lot of bug fixes I introduced as I was rushing this product out. Now is the time to clean up and fix my mess.

On the UI side of things, I've fixed several grammatical errors on a lot of info pages.

But the feature worth mentioning is I've updated the zooming feature on the menu page. before you started out at Zoom 1X and can zoom 2X,3X,4X. This was cool and all was good in the world.

But now i've changed it so you start at 1X and you can zoom out to 0.5X or 1.5X, 2X, 2.5X. This is much better as sometimes even zoom 1S might be too big and you might want to zoom out a bit. Also zooming up to 4x is ridiculous unnecessary and the jump from 1X to 2X was pretty substancial.



K, That's it. Motivation is kicking in...

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy mother's day to all the moms out there, especially mine. Been busy this week with backend website changes, so i'm sorry to say there isn't any new features for users this week. Still we had a lot of fixes and optimizations in back end, which I won't bore ya'll with.

Some big dineries projects are coming up that make take more than a week to launch, so we'll hope to see some big things coming soon!

We also added a new member to our team, which is exciting news which will help get out new features to dineries.

Restaurant.com is running a promo. Get a coupon that can save you a lot of money for just $2 with code: MOM

User Contributions

Keeping track of what users are contributing. Last week, we added a feature to allow users to add restaurants and menus via email described here. So for this week, we've started displaying any contributions you may have submitted to our site. As of now, it is only displayed on your user page, but soon it will be displayed on the restaurant page and we'll have the ability to add a menu directly from the page and not via email.

Submitting Menus to Dineries via email

Hi anybody who miraculously finds this blog and reads my work. The new feature of this week is menu submission via email. I thought of this idea as I want to make adding menus as easy as possible for myself, my team, and for any one who wants to help.

How does it work? Basically, you send an email with an attached menu image to menus@dineries.com with the 10 digit phone number as the subject. For example:

TO: menus@dineries.com

SUBJ: 5551234567

[attached menus go here]

The key here is to put the restaurant phone number as the subject of the email. Dineries will receive any email sent to menus@dineries.com and based on the phone number we can auto match the menu. If we don't have the restaurant, we will create it and match the menu.

I basically created this to easily add menus myself, but any and all menu submissions will be greatly appreciated. I am keeping track of who submits what and will award stats and down the line things like t-shirts to the top submitters. No promises as i'm very busy, but who doesn't like a free t-shirt?!

Hopefully someone who is OCD enough will want to complete their online menu collection on dineries.com.

Anyway if you're lazy, you can always just submit a menu to menus@dineries.com and we'll take care of matching it to the proper restaurant.

Advanced submission:

So you know how everyone these days has a smart phone? Well if you have an iPhone or an Android phone there is a free cool app called CamScanner. This app converts pictures you take to a scan like image, perfect for menu submission. I encourage you to check it out as it gives you the ability to submit menus from anywhere with your phone. One tip is to submit the email as an image and not as a pdf option. The pdf option tags a kinda ugly CamScanner logo on the pdf and it could block out some important menu text.

Happy Eating!

[edit]

If you noticed that is procedure is different than what you remember, you're not crazy, we changed it on 6/6/11 because it's better this way.

Avatar picture added

So we launched last weekend and dineries is starting to show up on serps. This is exciting! SERPs stand for search engine results pages. Anyway, after all the work to get the website launched, I went with a pretty easy feature this week and that is integrating gravatar.

Gravatar is a 3rd party avatar site that links an avatar image to your email. The concept is, if you setup your gravatar, all sites that use gravatar already have an avatar image for you, thus saving you time for adding an avatar everywhere. Anyway, if you already have gravatar your picture will show up on comments you post automatically, otherwise you can just sign up real quick.

Also on a side note I made a brisket yesterday and it was awesome.

Happy eating.

Internet Explorer fixes are out

So I launched the website without checking dineries.com on internet explorer. Doh! Well luckily, there wasn't all that much messed up. The only major thing broken was all the map functionality. Well I think that's been resolved, at least for ie8. I'll try to get around to testing it on ie 7 and 9 for all you ie fans.

For optimal usage, I recommend chrome, as that is what I mainly used for my development.

Dineries has been launched

Today marks the soft launch day of dineries.com! Time to submit the site to all the search engines. Hope you like it. Lots of good things to come!

The plan is to launch a new feature a week. Some weeks it might be something cool for the user, other weeks might be something for the business owner, or work on the backend which users might not see.

Please feel free to comment and suggest any features you would like to see.

http://dineries.com