the hngry blog

I’ve added a few new things to Hngry this week:

Restaurant pictures! Now you can upload up to 7 pictures per restaurant, per user, and they’ll appear on the restaurant page in Hngry. Take pictures of the restaurant itself, the food in particular, even you and your friends sharing a meal there… As long as it’s related to the restaurant at hand, it’s fair game. Ladies and gentlemen, start snapping those pictures and sharing them with the Hngry community. It’ll greatly help when others are trying to figure out what to eat, as they’ll be able to see the food itself and the general ambience/atmosphere of the restaurant. Here’s an example: Fricken Chicken. Note: The restaurant page will always show the latest 3 pictures from that particular restaurant. If there are 3 or more, an arrow will appear to the right of the images and you’ll be taken to the full gallery page. You can click on any of the images to view a larger version.

I’ve implemented a status bar around the site for searches. Now when you search for a restaurant, you’ll see the screen dim and a bar go across the screen for awhile. Hngry searches more than just its internal database to find restaurants for you, so sometimes search results take a little while to come up. This lets you know that Hngry is definitely still searching.

I’ve also implemented a couple of bug fixes around the site as well, as I’m always tightening up the code to make Hngry as stable as possible.

Later!

Just a quick note:  I finally got a chance to start on the revamped Hngry help section.  More will be coming as this week goes on, but I’ve started putting it online here.  Have any questions?  Is there anything you’d like for me to include in the help section?  Send them in to me at eat AT hngry DOT com or message me on AIM at xilef2121 or xilef2121away.

Thanks!

Recently, I’ve been busy getting the first batch of menus (I got several hundred into the system a couple of days ago) into Hngry for you guys. If you’ve requested a menu, it’s coming! If a restaurant has a menu available, instead of the link to suggest a menu on its page, now you’ll get a link to the actual menu. An example of this would be Izzo’s.
Also, I’ve been bringing online ordering online as well. Now, if you are at a restaurant that is enabled for online ordering, you can order food from within Hngry via one of our partners and get your food delivered right to your door, or have it ready to pick up when you get there. This is a first for Hngry. I haven’t seen any other site similar to Hngry that can go with you all the way from helping you decide where to eat to actually enabling you to order/have the food arrive at your door. An example of a restaurant with online menu ordering enabled would be Aneka Rasa.

Thanks for being a Hngry user. I appreciate it so much!

Just soft-launched a mini-companion to Hngry, “What’s your lunch?”

The premise is simple:  take a picture of your lunch, dinner, breakfast, snacks. any meal you’d like, really.  Upload it to the site and include as much or as little information as you want (short of your name and a picture title), including such things as an address for a restaurant, if it was purchased from one, or even a recipe for it that you’d like to share with others.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your cameraphones!  The pancakes are lonely.

For a little while now, you’ve been able to mark restaurants as favorites by clicking on “Add to favorites” on any restaurant page while you’re logged in.  Now, your list of favorites will appear in your profile.
I’ve also changed the design for the profile pages up a little bit.  That’s about all for now.

Want to link Hngry up from your blog, VIRB°, MySpace, Facebook or other online profile? Here are a couple of buttons that you can use to help spread the word!

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…

1. People wanted to be able to control the quality of the results that appear on the wheel (the original wheel pulls raw data straight from Yahoo and can’t tell whether the things it’s filling itself up with are all restaurants… sometimes it ends up pulling food distributors and other food-related places that you can’t actually get a meal from)
2. They wanted the ability to fill up the wheel with their own personal list of restaurants.
3. Also asked for: the ability to only pull restaurants that are in a specific food type
4. Finally, they wanted to be able to add their own criteria to the restaurant listings (rating, tags, etc)

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.

Give it a shot here.

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.