menumap

Thursday, May 29, 2008

How does menumaps work?

For anyone who is interested in the background technical details of how I get sync up menu information from other sites, I've written up a paper about it. You can find it over on benchcoach.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Narrow by review count

Josh Eddy writes:

I love your Menumap mashup, and I use it every week to find lunch around Union Square. The one thing that bothers me about all social review sites is how companies will post positive reviews of their own service, boosting their score. That's why when there's an an average rating with lots of reviews, I give it a lot more trust. Do you think it would be possible to somehow include that information on Menumap (or even filter by it)?

Well we aim to please Josh. Check it out:

Notice the new "At least X reviews" selection on the right, and the review count next to the star rating.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Thursday, November 8, 2007

For all those who want more restaurants or cities listed, I'm trying to figure out places from which to get more data. I'm not really sure what the best answer is, and I've got a post on the other blog trying to figure out what to do. I would love to hear some suggestions. (Comments are on over there.)

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

IE Fixes should be good

OK, I've sold my soul to the devil, installed XP and did some especially gross JavaScript work arounds for IE. I've tested it in IE 6 and I'm hoping that means that we're good with 7. Really... so gross.

Share and enjoy.

Thanks Noah

Noah has been helping me sort through some of the IE issues for menumaps. I don't have access to Windows, and thus Internet Explorer, so testing a challenge.

With his help I've managed to get I think the main features working. The two outstanding things that I know about are the rollover on the right isn't working, and that the neighborhood menus are showing up behind the map. I'm working on if, but if anyone knows the answer please feel free to drop me a line.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

12 months and 4,000 more restaurants later

Well, its time to dust off the old menumap code and give it an update and a whole new blog. I've cleaned up the way that I do the scraping and address lookup, so most of the changes happened behind the scenes. Hopefully you'll notice that the data quality has improved. The "link to this" url works fully now, preserving the highlighted selections. Filtering on cuisine should work correctly on all cities.

Also, since I've been blogging more about not menumap stuff, I created this blog to keep updates. Blogspot really is much easier than the custom wordpress install I have.

Here are the current stats:

City	Old Count	New Count	Websites	OpenTable
New York	5,535	6,264	3,129	494
Boston	1,261	1,335	831	143
San Francisco	2,199	2,191	1,240	289
Chicago	2,846	2,955	1,555	181
Los Angeles	1,478	3,628	2,055	237
Philadelphia	1,081	2,145	1,051	109
Washington DC	804	1,959	1,379	222
Totals		20,477	11,240	1,675

Please drop me a line if you have any suggestions or comments.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Menumaps: now 83% more!

I’ve been traveling in Europe since May, which means that I haven’t really had a need to find restaurants in North America, and thus haven’t really been on top of menumaps. (On that note, if you’re looking for places to eat in Italy, I’d highly recommend picking up Slow Food’s Osterie & Locande d’Italia) But I noticed a while back that the good folks over at menupages added a few more cities and people have been so kindly inquiring as to when I would include them. So when I got linked from a Philips Ad in the New York Times, it seemed like it was some to do a svn commit.

I’ve added 3 more cities and have been busy mining whatever I can. I’ve added phone numbers, links to the restaurant’s website and links directly to Open Table for those that have them. (I’m using the menupages partner code for this, so if there’s any sort of money changing hands because you book nothing comes to me.) There are a lot of places with websites, and it’s pretty neat to look through them all. Or at least you can waste plenty of time at it. It’s surprising how many places actually have a web site—you can limit the results to places that have either websites or online booking to make it easier.

That moves us up to a grand total from 8,756 to – wait for it – 16,108 restaurants into the system. That’s a lot of dots!

City	Old Count	New Count	Websites	OpenTable
New York	4939	5535	1957	347
Boston	1186	1261	743	118
San Francisco	2009	2199	1102	269
Chicago	2466	2846	1112	143
Los Angeles		1478	1015	157
Philadelphia		1081	727	83
Washington DC		804	814	157

I’ve also cleaned up the URLs a bit, and while I was at it, added links directly to city neighborhoods. This makes it easier to pass around links and you know, it just seems cleaner.