the hngry blog

You may have noticed that Hngry got a couple of new features lately.

On every restaurant page, underneath the map, there is a new cell phone icon. Clicking that will bring up a window that lets you enter a cell phone number. Once you’ve filled it in, click “Send” and a text message will be sent to that number containing the restaurant name, address, phone number and website address (if one is listed.) Other Hngry users are already making great use of this new feature… I personally know of someone who used it just today to send themselves address information for restaurants for a trip they’re taking this coming weekend. Now they’ll have all the location info wherever they go!

Although this works great for normal phones, where this feature really comes its own is if you happen to have a smartphone: Smartphones will detect the phone numbers and make them links, so that after receiving the message, one click on the phone number will let you choose to dial the restaurant immediately or save it to your contact list. Awesome!

If you do not want to have to enter your cell number everytime you want to send a SMS from Hngry, you can save your phone number to your user profile. Just type it in, using the form 555-555-5555 and Apply changes. I promise not to sell/give away your personal information, as per the Hngry Privacy Policy, so go ahead, save your number! I’ve already entered mine.

Also, on every restaurant page there is now a link that says “Have updated info? Suggest a change.” If you notice that any information about a restaurant is incorrect, just click that link and let me know what the issue is, so that together we can keep Hngry as accurate as possible. Thanks in advance!

I added a feature last night to help keep Hngry as accurate and up to date as possible. On every restaurant page there is now a link that says ” Have updated info? Suggest a change.“. If you click on that, you get a page where you can type in any information about the restaurant that you feel needs to be changed or updated. After verification, your change will be made and you’ll be notified that it has gone through. Please help to keep Hngry the most awesome place on the internet to find a great restaurant.

Thanks!

For a little while now, there’s been a bug in the Hngry search that people have reported to me, but I could never reproduce, because they never remembered exactly what they did to trip Hngry up. Chris Coyier was able to track it down this weekend, and I got it fixed. As it turns out, when you searched for a restaurant and did not include a comma between city and state, Hngry would bring you to a blank results page that had the last letter of your search terms removed. It’s fixed now… you should be able to search using city, state with or without a comma and you’ll get the same results you would if you included one. Less characters to type is a good thing!

I’ve been working on cleaning up the menu code on Hngry, which should allow the menus to load a lot faster than they were before… I’ve also added some styles to the menus themselves so they look more like menus…. Here’s a sample of what menus look like now. Over the coming weeks, I plan to ramp up the menu side of Hngry and get all of your requested menus and a while lot more all added to Hngry as soon as possible.