the hngry blog

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 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!

Okay, I admit I should have done this from the start, but I wanted to implement the automatic restaurant lookup as quickly as possible so that you could all start using it.   Now, when you search for a restaurant, hngry will pull up a list of restaurants that fit the criteria, you can pick the exact one you’re looking for, and it will add the restaurant info for you.  You can also search by food type.. for example, burgers, or italian and hngry will do its best to return some relevant results for you to pick from.  Nice!

For the most part, anyway.  First, the design has been reworked a bit, so if things look a little weird, refresh your browser and you should be set.

Hngry now has coupon search.  You can login, find and print restaurant coupons for your location before you go out to eat.  Soon, you should be able to set up notifications so that you’re reminded before your coupons expire (so that you can actually use some of those coupon books you’ve got lying around the house).

You can now set a default location (city, state, or even ZIP code if you’d like) code in your user options that will be utilized when you use both the coupon and automatic restaurant searches.  When you use the automatic restaurant search, you only have to type in the restaurant name now!  (this has actually worked since last weekend, but I never actually announced it.)

In your user options, you can now pick a default restaurant list view that will be used sitewide. For instance, if you set your default to the List All page: when you’re on the List All page and you click on a restaurant to edit, make your changes and then save them, you’ll be brought back to your List All page, not the paginated list page (which is what used to happen).

There have been some more little changes here and there, but those are the big ones. It’s about time for bed!

Now, when you log into hngry and get your restaurant list (either paginated or all on one page), you can sort your restaurants by rating or alphabetically (ascending or descending).  Just click on the column title in the blue header (to sort by ratings, click “Rating”) and it’ll sort your list in ascending order.  Click again and it’ll sort it in descending order. That’s it!

I made a few little fixes here and there today too, just making the site more stable and (hopefully) easier to use.

If you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see, feel free to leave a comment here.  I’d love to hear them.