the hngry blog

I’m working on enhancements to search and a new feature that will link into it: user profiles.

Now I’m finally working on features that will let you search for places to eat wherever you happen to be traveling to. These places will be recommended/rated by other Hngry members, so you know they’re going to be good!

I know there’s been a bit of radio silence around here for a little while now, but I promise it’s been because I’ve been busy programming my fingers off.  I spent the Independence Day holiday programming up a framework that will allow you to add other hngry users as your friends very very soon.  Around the same time you’ll also be able to email restaurant details (including a map to the restaurant if you’ve auto-added it from within hngry) to anyone, whether they’re defined as a hngry user or you just have their email address… this means that if you’re meeting a bunch of friends for lunch somewhere, you can log into hngry, pick a restaurant, select some friends, enter some email addresses if they’re not all on hngry yet, add whatever details you like, and hit Send.   Hngry will then email everyone the details on the restaurant for you.  Nice.

What else?  Building on top of the friends framework, you’ll be able to share your restaurant list with your friends, and vice versa.  If you see a restaurant on your friend’s list that you’d like to add to yours,  with one click, you’ve got it too.

I’m working on some last details and making these features secure, but soon they will be here!

Now I’m off to a wedding.

This weekend I’ve been programming up a hngry storm.

Expect to see the following new things on hngry in the next few days:
Coupon search based on your default location
the ability to pick a default list view for your restaurants (list all your restaurants by default on one page or paginated sitewide, with the ability to switch on-the-fly)
an updated design all around

And very soon, a new feature… which, if it takes off should make it super super simple to add restaurants you see offline (in magazines, newspapers, ads, etc) to your hngry account. I’m so excited about this, it’s ridiculous.

While writing the coupon features that are coming soon to a hngry near you, I ended up writing something else that has been asked for:  the ability to set a default location (in this case the ZIP code) for where you live.  This will be automatically used by any hngry features that require information on your location. So far, those features are automatic restaurant lookup (you’ll only have to put in the name of the restaurant now, unless you want to specify a ZIP code or city/state, in which case hngry will use that instead), and the upcoming coupon search feature (which will pull up all online restaurant coupons that are availble where you live. )

Default ZIP codes should be live this weekend, and coupon features will be going up soon after that.  I’ll let you know here when they are.

I got tagging working for individual restaurants on my test machine yesterday. This is another hngry user-requested feature, and will let you tag restaurants based on whatever you want… city, spiciness, distance.. whatever, and eventually to search your restaurants and the restaurants of other hngry users, using them… Tags aren’t live on hngry yet, but this is a progress report. I hope to have tags online by the end of the week.

Here are a few hngry features I’m working on rolling out:

Yahoo API integration (they have a huge database of just about every restaurant in the U.S., and allow others to connect to it and use it). Basically, what this means for you: Restaurant Search and much, much easier addition of a new restaurant to your list.

Tagging. I realize that the options for each restaurant are a bit limited now as far as food type goes… so you’ll be able to put in whatever words you want that describe your restaurants and pull them up by that too. I’m waiting for a stable Rails 1.1 release before I tackle that though. hngry is running on version 1.0 (which is the latest stable version) and 1.0 doesn’t have the tagging capabilities/support that 1.1 has. Rails 1.1 release candidate just came out, so it shouldn’t be long.
I’m also working on the social aspects of it (being able to search for restaurants that other hngry users like and have added to their list).

This should be fun!

Fairly soon, you’ll be able to add restaurants to hngry using a bookmarklet (it’s a special bookmark that you can click on no matter what website you’re on, and it will open up a popup that will let you enter your restaurant info directly into hngry.)  This means that if you’re at a restaurant website and you’re at a page that has their contact info on it, you can click the bookmarklet and then just copy and paste the info into the popup window.  There you have it, a new restaurant instantly added to your list! (well, almost… I’ll be working on the instant part later on )

Well, here it is, the first hngry blog post. The beauty of the fact that hngry is an online application is that hngry can and will constantly be improved to better suit the needs of its users. This blog is one part of my attempt to keep the lines of communication open and to let everyone know what’s going on at once, so I can spend less time answering emails and more time working on hngry. Hngry was built to solve a problem that I and my girlfriend have… not being able to figure out where to eat, especially when we’re already hungry. I figured that a lot of other people had the same problem, so here hngry is. I’m a user of hngry too, so hopefully if there are any problems I’ll see them at the same time as you do and get them fixed as soon as I can. This will also help me see the need for new features and add them more efficiently.

Thanks for your interest in hngry. It’s time to eat!