Other cities, wiki-like editing tools

You may have noticed that we now list Tampere and Porvoo in addition to Helsinki in our “choose city” list, and may be wondering, “Why Porvoo? Why not some other big city?” There is a method to our madness. Since we introduced our wiki-like editing tools, any registered user is able to add/edit restaurant information.

This means that if you live in an area that doesn’t have much information on Eat.fi yet, but wish it would get more visibility, you can do something about it. If we notice a lot of activity in a certain city, with most of the information (opening times, categories, and contact information for restaurants) filled in, we’ll display that city on the front page. Since Porvoo now has a lot of information on it, we gave Porvoo some of that front-page love.

What wiki-like editing tools?

On every restaurant page, at the top right, there is now a link that says “Update information.”

If you’re logged in as a registered user, you’ll find all the tools you need to change opening times, contact info, etc. in this menu. In order to prevent vandalism, we log all user changes in a public “history” log, which can also be found at the bottom of this menu.

If a restaurant owner has “claimed” their restaurant, ie has logged in and indicated that he or she is in charge of this restaurant’s information from now on, you won’t see these tools, but rather a message field which will allow you to report wrong information directly to the restaurant owner.

We believe that by giving users and owners direct and free access to restaurant information, the site will stay far more accurate than if we tried to centralize upkeep. No one knows better(or sooner) than the restaurant owners or local customers themselves when a restaurant is undergoing renovations, or has changed its opening times. Try it out and let us know what you think!

The new Eat.fi is finally here.

We have launched. We’re live. There’s no going back now. Here are some things that have changed since the last beta update:

1. We imported a database of all Finnish establishments that serve alcohol. This unfortunately includes a lot of bars that will have to be weeded out, but it also covers most restaurants all over the country.
2. We included wiki-like editing tools for registered users, so if you see a mistake, you can easily fix it. This also allows impatient users to get Eat.fi started in their own area without having to wait for us to get to it–we’re going city by city, starting with Tampere. The most active cities will get a spot in our “Choose a city” drop down menu.
3. In general, we’ve increased and improved features for registered users. Log in and see!

Do let us know if the map seems slow, or if you encounter other problems. We’ve done our best to test every conceivable configuration, but there are always surprises…Please note, though: If you’re running IE5, there is nothing we can do to make a service like this one, with a dynamic map, load at any forgiveable speed. If you have IE6, speeds should be tolerable but we still recommend you upgrade to IE7 (which will make browsing other sites a much nicer experience as well) or even better, get Firefox.