Small fixes you asked for

We’re delighted so many of you have taken the time to send us feedback. Here are a bunch of changes we’ve made recently in response to your requests:

1. Remember me! We agree, it was incredibly annoying to have to re-login all the time. We’ve added the “remember me” checkbox to the login form, so this shouldn’t be happening anymore.
2. Re-order search results. Another tiny yet powerful tool. There’s a drop-down menu at the top right of the search result page now which lets you reorder your search results. So for example, if you can’t remember the name of that new italian place, search for “ital” and reorder by “most recent”. Best japanese restaurant? Search for “japan” and reorder by “food quality”. Ta-dah!
3. Clearer map filters. People used to forget filters “on” and wonder why certain restaurants weren’t appearing on the map. If all filters are showing all possible results, the text on each one is now in brackets and greyed out, like so:
4. See all reviews on Eat.fi. We’ve added an “All of Eat.fi” tab to the “Reviews” section, so you can follow all reviews across the country at once, to help you find restaurants in other cities that you may want to bookmark in case you visit later.

And yes. We are working on the mobile site. There’s a functioning beta already, but it’s still missing a bunch of features that we’d like to add before you all start using it and wondering where those features are. If you really really want to start using the beta already, while being fully aware that it is very much still under construction, send us an email and we’ll send you the link.

Updates to the Beta

We’ve updated the beta! This’ll be the last update before we make the site live.

Some of the new features:

1. Internet Explorer compatibility.
2. A Community page, where you can finally see who the real top reviewers are (yeah!), and browse recently added photos.
3. If you’re registered, you can add photos to your reviews, and rate other people’s reviews. The profile pages have also been improved.
4. If you click on “Helsinki” on the map page, you’ll find presets. Registered, logged-in users can save often-used search settings for one-click access.
5. At the bottom of each individual restaurant page, we’ve added “Nearby alternatives.”
6. Each restaurant has its own “Community” tab to show that restaurant’s fans, and the pictures users have taken of its dishes.

As before, please note that any content you add to the beta will be deleted before the site goes live. But go wild, kick the tires, etc…and let us know of any bugs you may find! We’re almost there, we swear.

http://beta.eat.fi (username “eat” and password “better”)

Ladies and Gentlemen! It’s a…Beta!

Yes, the beta version of eat.fi is finally public.

I developed the original Eat.fi in 2005 because I really like good food, but was usually too busy or too lazy to cook, and tended to forget to eat until most restaurants had already closed. I couldn’t find a site that could tell me what was good, still open, and not too far away. Over time, as Eat.fi grew more popular, it became increasingly obvious that I had a choice to make; keep it as a little Helsinki-only site, or give it a chance to grow into something more robust and mature. So after a year of development, we finally came up with this, the original Eat.fi’s shiny new big brother, built entirely from the ground up to look better, work better, and be far more expandable in the future.

But please note: THIS IS A BETA SITE. Not beta in the endless Web 2.0 sense. We mean beta in the “testing phase sandbox not live yet” sense. This means:

• Do not add any real content to this site, and do not count on the information on it to be accurate or up to date. Any reviews, accounts, profile data, or other content that you put on this beta site will disappear in a month. It will be deleted. Gone. Not retrievable. Therefore, feel free to play around as much as you like, push the site to its limits, but if you have a real review to write, write it in the old Eat.fi site. Once beta testing is over, we will port everything from the old Eat.fi to the final new site.
• The beta site is not yet optimized for Internet Explorer. It will be, but we’re doing initial testing in Firefox and Safari first.
• The beta site is only in English. The final site will also be in Finnish and Swedish, but we want to hone all the texts in English first before we hand the files over to a real translator.
• Please tell us about any bugs or problems you find. Be critical, be honest. This is what the beta site is for–to run the site through its paces, kick the tires and beat it up before we let it go live to thousands of impatient people.

With all of the above in mind, here it is: http://beta.eat.fi (username “eat” and password “better”)

Thank you in advance.

–Tina Aspiala and the rest of the Eat.fi development team

Back from off the grid

Back from my trip, hello again. Had a little chat about the future of eat, had time to think, etc, and have decided that it’s time to really overhaul the site. This again will take time, hopefully done around May-June. Sorry about the vagueness, but I don’t want to promise anything until the features have been beta tested at least…

Features that are already in the testing phase: User logins. What this means is you’ll be able to login and mark the restaurants that are your favorites, as well as those you’ve always wanted to go to but never remember to follow up on. You’ll be able to only see those on the map if you want, essentially giving you your own custom restaurant map.

We’re also designing an eat.fi mobile widget with the help of Widsets. More on this later.

Hei taas, olen palanut sieltä missä pippuri kasvaa ja nettiä ei ole, ja nyt suunnitellaan ihan uutta eat.fi versiota, joka on varmaan vasta kesäkuussa valmis. Tällä hetkellä testataan asiakkaiden kirjautumista, mitä tarkoittaa sitä, että ravintolaasiakkaat voivat kirjautua sisään omilla tunnuksillaan ja valitsemalla lempiravintolansa sekä ravintolat, jossa joskus haluaa käydä, voivat rakentaa omaa eat.fi karttaa.

Olemme myös kehittämässä eat.fi mobiili widgetin Widsets:in avulla.

Holiday opening times

Hope you all had a nice little holiday season–for us it brought up an interesting question: We would like to provide the most accurate opening times possible at all times, but the holidays throw this out of whack. We do provide restaurants with the ability to add their holiday dates on their edit pages, but of course since the holidays are also the busiest times of the year for them, most don’t have the time to change details on the web. We got as many correct holiday opening times as we could this Christmas, but we’d prefer to have more.

We are already brainstorming new and better ways to make the site more accurate for the next holiday season, to make it even easier to add these kinds of updates, to spread the word, and so on. If you have any fantastic ideas you’d like to add to what we’re considering, please let your voice be heard and let us know!

Toivottavasti teillä kaikilla oli mukava joulu–me vietettiin se pääasiallisesti miettimässä, miten saisimme enemmän pyhien ja muiden erikoispäivien aukioloaikoja eat.fi:hin. Ravintolanomistajat voivat lisätä niitä jo itse, mutta se on juuri sitä kiirellistä aikaa, jolloin ravintolanomistajilla ei ole paljon aikaa. Mietimme jo pari uutta mahdollisuutta, miten tekisimme niille tämän homman helpommaksi. Se kun olisi kätevää tietää, mitä on varmasti jouluna auki. Jos teillä on ideoita tähän suhteen, kertokaa!

Coming soon: Swedish version

We have found a translator who is translating the site to Swedish. You can already see some of this on the eat mobile site. You will be able to write restaurant reviews in Swedish as well, and have them show up on the English and Finnish sites.

You can see our work in progress here: http://www.eat.fi/?setLang=6

If you know Swedish and find mistakes, please let us know and we’ll correct them as soon as possible.