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.
I’ve been working on this release of Hngry since October of last year, and I believe it’s finally a worthy upgrade to Hngry. There are a few kinks to work out here and there, and much more content is coming, but Hngry v3 is here now!!!
Version 1 of this site was pretty much just a place where you could add restaurants to a personalized list, rate, add notes about them and generally keep your restaurant info organized.
Version 2 added an improved design and the ability to have restaurant information added for you automatically, based on the restaurant name and where you live, the ability to keep track of your restaurant coupons so you can use them before you expire, as well as some other requested features.
Version 3, which went live this week includes the following features:
Public pages for every restaurant, so you don’t have to log in to use Hngry anymore, unless you want to manage/view personal information for your own restaurant list, see what your friends have added, etc. I’ve pulled everything I could possibly pull out of behind the login wall, so you can use a ton of Hngry features without even having an account or having to log in (for when you do have an account, but just want to do a quick search).
Menu support. This is huge. Every restaurant page now has the ability to show menu items and prices for everything on their menu, and every menu item is rateable. This means that you can search for a restaurant, see which ones are ranked highest, find the highest rated menu items, and get a map of where the restaurant is/driving directions, so even if you’re in another city, you can find somewhere to eat, know where it is located (with full driving directions), and have an great idea of what to eat before you even get there. There are over 180,000 menu items in the database right now, and a plan in the works to let you get all of your restaurant menus into Hngry, where they’ll be ratable, sortable and much more powerful, because they’ll link you to other people who like the same restaurant. I’ll let you know when you can start getting your own menus into Hngry.
Location-awareness. Hngry knows where everything in the restaurant list is located physically, so it can pull nearby restaurants, and soon, nearby cities, depending on what page you are on, and what restaurant/city you are looking at.
Support for 600+ metropolitan areas in the US, and a few in other parts of the world. Every metro area has its own page, which includes updated data on the newest users, most popular restaurants, most commonly used tags, recently added restaurants, and the latest reviews for that area. The page also includes a map that shows the locations of the newest restaurants, with links to their full pages, of course. If your particular metro area isn’t in the list, just select the one that is nearest you, then suggest your metro from the link on the bottom of the metro page, and I will add it.
User profile pictures. Now you can upload a picture that represents who you are and will be displayed around the site, in your user profile and pretty much anything that has your username attached. 
Just log in, click on Edit your profile, click on Upload/Change profile image, then follow the instructions, or click here.
The ability to rate restaurants right on their pages. Just run your cursor over the number of stars you’d like and click. It couldn’t be simpler.
The ability to set restaurants as favorites with a single click on the restaurant page, so you can see which restaurants in your area are favorites of other people, and vice-versa.
Creating/editing your review right from the restaurant page. This is pretty self-explanatory… you can just click on the proper place on the restaurant page, and you can type/save your review right there!
RSS Feeds. You can now subscribe to Recently Added Restaurants & Latest Reviews on every metro page, and also subscribe to your friends’ restaurant lists, or anyone’s reviews. Just look for the orange RSS icon (
) around the site.
Search for restaurants nearby. This feature is especially useful when traveling. For example, you can type the address of the hotel where you are staying and find out which restaurants are close to you and what other Hngry users think of them. It can also be used to find restaurants near you that you might not have even known were there.
A couple of key Hngry v3 features to point out:
You are asked to pick a metropolitan area when you first log in. After that, if you’d like to switch metros, all you’ve got to do is browse to the page for the metro you want to switch to and click “Make this your home metro”. Easy!
You can now search Hngry from just about any page on the site. If you’re on a city page, it’ll also fill in the location for you automatically, so you don’t have very much to type.
Okay, I think that’s about it for now. I’m still working on writing a full help section, but hopefully this post is helpful to you.
I’m proud of this release, and I hope that it becomes more and more useful to you as time goes on. If you have any questions , problems or comments, please leave a comment below or email me at eat at hngry dot com.
Log in! Add some restaurants. Invite some friends to Hngry.
Thanks for being a Hngry user. It would be nothing without you guys.
That’s pretty much it for now I just put the new version online. Feel free to log in and play around. If anything doesn’t work for you, please leave a comment and I’ll get it fixed. Let me know what you think!
I’ll be adding a help section to the site, and a large post here detailing what’s new and what’s going to be added to Hngry v3 in the next few days, but if you’ve been a user for awhile, you can probably figure most of it out on your own, so please check out the new version!
Oh yeah.. If it doesn’t look quite right to you when you first load the site, try refreshing a couple of times.
Go to Hngry
It’s been a long time coming, but Hngry version 3 is almost here… it should roll out to the server and settle in pretty nicely within a week. In preparation for this momentous occasion: if you have any restaurants in Hngry right now that you haven’t filled in all the data for (specifically city, state), please do so ASAP so they can be moved over to Hngry v3 automagically. I’ve had to make some major database changes and in order for everyone to keep their restaurant lists in working order, the location data needs to be filled in.
If you don’t do it before launch, don’t worry! You’ll still be able to fill in the information for those restaurants in Hngry v3 and have them migrated for you within a day or so after you fill in the blanks No restaurants will be harmed in the making of this version.
I’m looking forward to getting this version out to you guys!
I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, but rest assured I’ve been busy working on Hngry. There are some very exciting things happening around here!
Basically, a much improved, more socially oriented version of Hngry (I’m calling it version 3) is coming down the pipeline.. It includes a major rework of the site’s backend, giving me the capability to add some very powerful features (I’m working on doing that now.) It’s going to include a very very powerful restaurant search, menus from restaurants all over the US (for now) and much much more.
All of your current restaurant data will be moved over to the new version, of course, so keep on using Hngry and you’ll be fine when v3 launches in a few months. I’m a Hngry user too, so rest assured I’ll be bringing all current data over as I’d like to keep my restaurant list around
Thanks for using Hngry!
The other day, I was using Hngry to figure out where I wanted to eat and realized that a big part of deciding where to eat is the proximity of particular restaurants to wherever you are. I wrote a geocoding function in a few hours, and this page (login required) is the result. Basically it gives you a draggable, zoomable Google map of the restaurants on your list, including clickable map markers that pop up details about each restaurant, with a link that goes to your restaurant info page.
Hngry has been saving longitude/latitude data for every restaurant that has been automatically added using the built-in auto-add function, so if you’ve added all of your restaurants using that function, you’re in luck, and your map will just work. If yours doesn’t work (likely because your address data is incomplete), fill in the address data for your restaurants (street address, city and state) and then let me know at eat (at) hngry dot com and I will make sure that longitude/latitude data gets generated for your restaurants.
Any restaurants that you add in the future using the auto-add function will automatically appear on your map.
Hope it’s helpful to you! Let me know if you have any issues (some of my restaurants ended up on a different continent at first for some reason) and I’ll get them straightened out.
I’m working on enhancements to search and a new feature that will link into it: user profiles.
Ok, I’ve finished the first version of Hngry search. Now when you’re traveling, you can search for the city & state that you’re in, or just by state, and hngry will give you a list of the restaurants in that area, complete with ratings, reviews by other Hngry members (if you’d like to review a restaurant in your list, just click on the pencil icon on the side of it to go into edit mode, then just put your review in the section provided), maps to the restaurants (you’ll see a little car on the side of the restaurant listing for those that include directions). The best part is, you don’t even have to log in to use the search! This means that if you’re in another town trying to find something good to eat, you can just go to hngry.com/search and search quickly, right from there.
I’m still working on it, so the format might be changing a bit to include more info, like usernames, so you can find other hngry users in your town or in other cities, pricing, food types and more! You’ll be able to add a restaurant to your list from the search results, and you’ll also be able to search by more than just city/state and sort the restaurants by different criteria as well.
Basically, search isn’t done, not by a long shot, but I wanted to get this feature out so you can play with it and hopefully get even more use out of Hngry.
If Hngry is helpful to you, please invite your friends to use it as well… it would mean a lot to me. Oh, and if you know any restaurant owners personally, tell them to email eat at hngry dot com. I’ve got something really special in the works for restaurant owners that will hopefully make Hngry more useful for everyone.