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