This doesn’t have anything to do with Hngry per se, but I thought this was an awesome post about all the things you can get at restaurants that aren’t actually on the menu. I’m definitely trying some of these out.
Last week, there was a fun little site called The Wheel of Food (later renamed to The Wheel of Lunch) that spread around the internet. It’s pretty simple: it allows you to put in a location and what you’re looking for (”70809″ and “burgers”, for example), and it would pull some restaurants or food-related places from Yahoo, load up “The Wheel of Lunch” and give it a virtual spin, eventually landing on a lunchtime decision.
I followed the story pretty closely over a couple of days (as I’m always looking for food-related happenings on the internet) and noticed a few common issues with the Wheel cropping up in the comments of the Wheel of Lunch related blog posts…
I don’t know about you, but that sounded like a job for Hngry! Hngry already does all of that: You’ll only find restaurants in Hngry, nothing else. Hngry already lets you make personal restaurant lists, keeps track of food type, and lets you rate, tag restaurants and much more!
So it’s with great excitement that I announce that Hngry now has multiple Wheels of Food built in, thanks to Jim Bumgardner (developer of the original Wheel!)
On every metro page, there is now a link to the Wheel for that particular metro. It fills up randomly with restaurants from the metro it is located in. Anyone can use them, whether they’re Hngry users or not. Every Hngry user also has a personal Wheel. When you’re logged in, look for the new Wheel of Lunch link on the bottom of your dashboard. This one fills up with a random selection of your personal restaurants (You need at least 15 restaurants in your list right now for it to work). Soon (hopefully this week) I’m going to build one more that lets you pick a food type and spending limit for the restaurants that fill the wheel.
Go spin the wheel! If you’ve got friends who are indecisive about what to eat, let them know about the Wheel of Lunch!
Here’s a sample metro Wheel: Baton Rouge, LA
And here is your personal Wheel: Your Wheel
Just a quick note to let you know that the Where to eat? function is back… “Where to eat?” picks from your favorite restaurants for you when you just can’t decide where to eat. This is an updated version that includes support for tags, so you can either pick a food type and amount to spend, or you can pick a tag or two.
Now that the new version of Hngry is up, I can bring new features online as quickly as I used to before I started working on v3. Here are a couple that I added last night: Favorite food display: If anyone has entered favorite foods for a particular restaurant, they’ll be listed on the restaurant page. Note: to add your favorite foods to a restaurant, either go to its page while logged in, and click on the pencil icon (this actually lets you edit a good bit of personal information about the restaurant) or, while looking at your restaurant list, click on the pencil icon the side of whatever restaurant you’d like to add more personal information to.
I also added Nearby cities: on every metro page. If you’re on a metro page, Hngry will now show you a list of nearby cities, so you can easily browse through those as well.
Now, I’m working on a revamped version of the Where to eat function, which helps you decide where to eat when you just can’t make up your mind!
Hngry now supports microformats on every restaurant page, with an hCard that contains the address, latitude and longitude of the restaurant. I plan to add hReview support shortly.