foodha for thought - menuism blog

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

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

So here’s a fun little feature that we whipped up over the weekend – browsable top users list. Now you can see the highest tip givers and receivers.

Some Tip Reminders:

• Tips are what count, not points. So if you’ve been accumulating tons of points, find some good reviews to tip!
• You’ll get rewarded even more if you tip a good review rather than a bad one. How? When other people tip the same review you tipped, you get a fractional bonus (for your tips given total) – this can add up very fast for a good review. It’s sorta like buying into a hot stock really early.
• If you haven’t grasped the tip concept yet. Just think about tipping at a restaurant – you tip for good service. There are big tippers and big tip earners (those who provide great service). Everyone loves both kind of people, so we highlight them!

Here’s the link to check out the users list:

http://www.menuism.com/users

You can also browse by city (there’s a link under “Top Users” for every city page):

http://www.menuism.com/cities/Seattle/WA/users

Now you can see all the cool gravatar images people have been putting up! If you don’t have a pic yet, go to http://www.gravatar.com and create and acount with the same email address you used on menuism.com.

If you post any comments on the blog, use the same email address and your pic will also show up here (same goes for any other blog that is Gravatar-enabled).

Question: Is the tips concept confusing? Any suggestions for clarifying it?

Enjoy!

- Justin

Now that we’ve gotten this blog up it’s time to put it to good use. Today we did a first pass at all your wonderful feedback and fixed a number of nagging issues. I won’t list all of them here, but there are two that are worth mentioning (and trying out):

1. streamlining menu item adding. we’ve smoothed out the menu item addition form, so it’s much easier to add a single dish to a menu (or even multiple in succession).
2. restaurant pages now show existing reviews when there are no items on the menu, so there’s something to see. (we’d love your opinion on this behavior – see the end of this post)

Big thanks to bluerhapsodies, liksani, jetleigh, chilumba, rags, jdogg, and billyd94 for bringing these and the other issues we fixed to our attention! If you’ve sent feedback, don’t worry, we’ll definitely get to it. =)

I’ve also noticed that some users are using the Gravatar system with their user accounts – they look awesome, and really brighten up the reviews. If you haven’t tried it out, I’d encourage you to check out Gravatar when you get the chance.

So regarding the #2 fix above: which do you prefer to see first on a restaurant page: the menu or the reviews? We’re torn on this and we’d like to know what you think.

That’s all for now. Keep up the great usage and feedback!

-John