menumap

How does menumaps work?

2008-05-29T09:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Narrow by review count

2007-11-29T10:07:00.001-08:00

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!

To Yelp or not to Yelp

2007-11-08T07:29:00.001-08:00

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.)

IE Fixes should be good

2007-11-06T11:26:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-06T07:19:00.001-08:00

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.

12 months and 4,000 more restaurants later

2007-11-04T07:38:00.001-08:00

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.

Menumaps: now 83% more!

2006-11-12T06:11:00.000-08:00

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.

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/city/NewYork

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/city/NewYork/Lower%20East%20Side

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/city/NewYork/Williamsburg%20%2F%20Greenpoint

etc…

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/city/SanFrancisco

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/city/SanFrancisco/Castro

etc… etc… etc…

Share and enjoy!

Multiple City Support

2006-04-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

Hey y’all, I thought I’d take a break from all the doom and gloom posts about economics to update menumap. It’s been a while! Google updated their mapping api and menupages added three new cities. menupages.com did multiple cities by creating new sites with seperate databases (with overlapping IDs), and I keep everything in one database, so I had to do some restructuring to support multiple cities. It’s all one big Earth to me, so as you zoom in and out the restaurant details and filter will appear or disappear depending upon the city you’re looking att.

The number of restaurants in the database has gone from 4,484 to 10,590. I’ve cleaned up the UI a bit, fixed a few bugs, and added a “link_to” which should let people pass urls around.

There are still issues with the geocoding. I think, for example, there are many restaurants really in Chelsea showing up in Brooklyn because it goes confused about which “6th Ave” it was looking for. I think I’m going to need to add zipcode to the neighborhood info, but that’s for another day.

Please let me know of any problems or if you have any suggestions. For example, where should I center the map for each city? Send me links please.

In case you forgot the link.

Somewhat back to normal

2006-03-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

For the 3 people out there who use it religiously (number is probably exaggerated) the menupages mashup is up and running, albeit at a different url.

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/map

Othersites to come up shortly.

Hi everyone!

2006-01-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

It’s funny how people pick up upon random things you do. I hadthe idea for the mashup while Robin and I were trying to figure outwhere to eat on Friday night. I had what you see up on Sunday, and Ihaven’t touched it since. It was more of a casual weekend projectdoing tooling around with google maps and Ajax, so it’s prettyamazing that other people are finding out about it!

Recap:

Saturday, Sunday: Geeking out. Toss it up on a server.
Monday (9th): IM dozen people to show off and fish forcomplements. Fire off an email to menupages. Post to blog.
- Robin: “You never proof read anything, do you? Don’t leaveit like that. People are going to think you are an illiteratemoron.”
- Me: “Whatever. No one’s going to see it.”

Friday: Notice that my server is busy. What the… Poke through access.log and see that Google Maps Mania somehow finds it – the day that they their interview on NPR wasbroadcast. Yee-haw! Curious as to how they found me, I ask how they did it and they say “Similar to technorati - it’s my trade secret.”

So mysterious.

Monday (16th): Server dies for 4 days for reasons unexplained.

Very annoying, though mostly because it hosts my mail.
Saturday, Sunday, Monday: Spend weekend packing, moving out of myapartment, being tired.
Get email from CEO of menupages saying that I am the man, andthat Eater and Grid Skipper picked it up.
Today: Gothamist links.

The internet. Who knew?

This was a casual throw-away project for me, (quote Gridskipper: “A bit kludgy and slow”), but I’m basically happily unemployed andthis is fun to play with so what else do you think I should do withit? I was thinking about selling it to menupages so I could, youknow, finance that wine bar we’ve been thinking about starting. Itmight be nice to pull in different data sources – something thatcovers Brooklyn, perhaps? Who knows. Feel free to drop me a linewith any questions/suggestions.

Google Maps + Menupages.com mash-up

2006-01-09T08:05:00.000-08:00

I live in New York City and I eat out a lot. I end up going to the same places a lot of the time, places in familar haunts or places I hear about from other people. But it often happens that I’m looking for something in a neiborhood and there’s no good way of doing proximity exploring. I’m always scrolling through citysearch for example trying to find a sushi-no-maybe-indian place in some neiborhood I’m not familiar with. So I decided to take one of my favorite sites, menupages.com, which has the menus of all these places online, and plug it into google maps.

Now at its new home:

http://menumap.monkeythumb.net/map