grubblog

It's been a long time since that fateful day when the idea was born, but we've finally hit the big time. Ok, so it's not really the "big time," but we were casually mentioned at philly.com the other day. Interestingly, we've been in touch with the owner of the other website mentioned and we're looking at ways to team up.

Since the official launch, we've been trying to fix a lot of the minor annoyances that seem to be popping up. But don't worry- we're still working on some major upgrades to make your dining experience that much better.

As always, you can shoot me an e-mail with comments or suggestions at dave@cityjoints.com.

-friedman

Yesterday, Dave and I spent the better part of the day cleaning up a few bugs on the site. Dave made a really nice upgrade to the search box, so that should work much better for you. I also added some user stats pages, which you can find here.

The other major issue we tackled was our identity crisis--it seems not many people, besides Dave and myself, like the name, or can even pronounce, Gruburge. So we're throwing around a couple of new names, and are also just considering splitting it to make it a little more obvious: GrubUrge. If anyone has suggestions or feedback about the current name (and it's capitalization), let us know.

Once again, Gruburge has changed its official programming headquarters. For those who didn't know, we started out at Cosi. It was there, that the prediction algorithm was first brought into existence. As the summer came into fruition, we moved our programming headquarters to Cafe Mocha where it turns out that Dr. Kannan's daughter is working. Cafe Mocha treated us well, truly bringing Gruburge into its beta stages.

Being the adventuresome grubbers that we are, we have found a new place of programming with delicious drinks to serve as our caffeinated muse - The ChapterHouse Cafe & Gallery. What can I say beyond free wireless and live music?

There was only one night this week I slept before 3 am, and I'm not sure what night that was. We've got lots of new features coming out soon (including, Shira, some things that will make pagination easier). Expect to see something big this week.

Now I think I'll treat myself to an early night's sleep.
--
ark

ps: trying to serialize objects in php sucks. roll your own and save some headaches.

And shira, thanks for the choco tacos. A perfect midnight snack.

Who gets the shout out of the day? Shira. Why? Because when ark and I were starting to drag after 7 hours of straight programming (ok, there was some grilling in the middle), Shira came through with midnight cookies. And milk.

We've got lots of good things just about to happen. Geobrowsing. Hundreds of new restaurants in Philadelphia. New Grubcities. That's right, we're on the verge of letting some lucky grubbers in other cities start to rate their favorite spots. It's going to huge!

Oh, and let us know how you like the new front page!

-friedman

We're just about ready to unleash multiple grub-cities. It's taken a lot of work to make sure that everything will make sense, but it looks like the pieces are about to fall in place. So travelers, rest assured that if you find yourself in NY, LA, or even Wichita (well, maybe not there), we'll have some predictions generated just for you tastes.

On another note, we'd like to give a shout out to Beker (of www.beker.com fame) who has been instrumental in the graphic design of the site. Maybe we'll take him out for a Guiness to say thanks.

-friedman

We just added links to a bunch of RSS feeds for the site, so now you can subscribe to keep up to date with the newest restaurants and recent activity on gruburge. Or you can subscribe to your friends' pages to find out where they've been eating. Hope you enjoy it.

ark


p.s.

Dave has some mad cool tricks up his sleeve, so look out for some awesome new features in the near future.