City Joints is the new blog

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and had some wonderful home-cooked food.

In between making turkey and stuffing, I rebuilt the search box for a faster and, more importantly, better search feature. It's now correctly returning things like Cafe Spice on top when you search for, say, 'Cafe Spice'. There is still some tweaking to go, but I think you'll be pleased.

Also, it's not official, but you may have noticed a little button on top that says 'Change City'. We've loaded up the data for New York (Manhattan) and are getting rid of some bugs before we officially go live there. However, if you've got some friends in the city let them know that they can start rating and finding new places to eat.

And, finally, yet another shout out to Foobooz. We might tell you where to eat that you haven't been, but he'll get you the best deals in town.

--friedman

So, while reading my new favorite food blog, Foobooz, I came across Daniel Rubin's post from today at philly.com. I'm not really sure why we're the only mention without a link, but it's good to see our name in print.

Also, congrats and thanks to Philaguerilla for his amazing contributions to the reviews. I think he may be the first person to hit 100 reviews in under 2 days. And the best part? I feel like I know his wife now.

--friedman

I was reading the Foobooz blog today getting the lowdown on a joint called 'Solefood' and when I scrolled down I noticed a post about CityJoints. Plus, we're now under the food links on Foobooz.

Thanks Foobooz!

You can checkout Foobooz ratings on CityJoints here: http://cityjoints.com/users/foobooz.

Labels: cityjoints, food blogs

I stumbled across this interesting article in the NY Times yesterday and got to thinking how CityJoints fits into this picture. We're already doing a lot of the Web2.0 stuff--mashups with google maps, integration with a few search APIs to suggest restaurant address details after you input a restaurant name--but we're also trying to bring you something beyond this.

Markoff cites as a typical Web3.0 question: "'I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.'" Basically, the input here is bunch of information about what a particular user is looking for in addition to some personal information particular to his situation that's going to affect what kind of results he wants to see.

At CityJoints, the whole idea behind our prediction algorithm is to take into account the specifics of your personal tastes to refine your search results. You may be looking for a new Italian BYOB joint to try, but your tastes typically differ from those of the masses. So sorting a list of Italian BYOB joints by highest average rating is not going to help you.

Our algorithm takes into account every restaurant that you've rated, and uses data from every other user on the site about every restaurant each of them has rated to generate personalized predictions for you.

So while our maps and tagging is cool and probably familiar to you, take another look at your recommendations page and see what's suggested. We think you'll like it.

Labels: cityjoints development

Another long day of programming is done, ending with a few delicious gruburgers. This week, not too much happened on the front end, but we cleaned up a lot of stuff on the backend, made some tools to handle the deletion of duplicate restaurants, streamlined some of our MySQL tables, and fixed a few bugs.

We also added a new featured Philadelphia food blog, foobooz.com. We noticed a user named foobooz earlier in the week, checked out his blog, and liked it so much we added it to the side of the pages for CityJoints Philadelphia.

This is a good opportunity to mention that you can now put additional information on your profile page on CityJoints; namely, you can post a little bio about yourself and epicurean preferences and you can also post a link to your website (or food blog).

Hope you guys like the new features.

Labels: features, updates