ottawa foodies

OK, after a week or two here are a few things that have me a bit confused.

Not sure what "buzz" is above. i.e. the intent vs forums. I guess the difference is that I can't put anything there :-)

Not sure how to get into the "Foods" and "Establishments" section other than by "find". Though that does seem to work, there is no apparant way I can find to browse either.

When adding a new food I should be able to add a "reference" picture for it. I just added a few german foods and was not presented with this option until I commented on that type of food at a particular restaurant, in which case I did not have photos from that place. Might also provide a way to link a food to a recipe in the forums.

[...]

Oh wait, "tags" seems to be how to get into Food and Establishments. One down :-)

"Buzz" is basically for reviews, and "Forums" are for discussions. Oftentimes reviews get stuck in the forums, so we should try to be careful and post our reviews under "Buzz".

I tend to think that a well written, acurate review of a restaurant/vendor (with or without photos from *the actual location*), and the intention of it being viewed by all of the visitors to the site should go under "Buzz", while chit-chatty discussions and comments can be kept in the forums, as the forums will eventually age.

A user wanting to know about a certain local restaurant or vendor can simply locate it on the site and read every review that has been posted.

I think that's right.

OK, that makes sense with "buzz" - i do something similar on my site. Though I still don't see any way for me to contribute to it.

Odd, now I see a bunch of my stuff showing up under "buzz" when I check with "IE", but something completely different under my usual browser Mozilla. When I do several "mark this page as read" under Mozilla I get to the same spot as IE, even though I never really use IE except to check irregularities or suspected ones in websites.

EDIT : Ok, I get how it works with the buzz ... my only problem was that I wasn't seeing any of my own stuff in there but after I hit "mark this page as read" a few times I was good

Oh yeah, another question I had when adding my faulty Di Rienzo was whether or not there should be locations for some of the ethnic areas like Little Italy and Chinatown. Those are right next to each other I know, but I'm not sure where else to classify them. City Center, maybe?

And another one - I just noticed most people's profiles have favorite foods, but I cannot find a way to add one for me. I see there are currently 4 "fans of beer", for example, and that's a club I definitely want to be a member of!

EDIT : never-mind, I just saw that I have to "vote for beer" to add it to my favorites. Yay beer!

How do I add the "delivery" tag to a place?

thanks.

I think mmmfood answered most of your questions very well. Let me know if you still have any. You can browse all restaurants either via the "tags" page (by tag) or by clicking "See all..." just after the Top 15 list on the home page.

For quality control reasons, you can't add the delivery tag to an existing vendor yourself. The correct way to do it is to click on "See something wrong? Want to add info? Click here." and then leave me a message saying the delivery tag should be added. I see you already did this for the Istanbouli restaurant. Awesome! :-)

BTW, the forums were added to this site as an afterthought. They are a type of chit chat, as mmmfood said. The real "meat" (apologies to vegetarians) of the site is the food/vendor comments. The forums have really taken off and their content is really very good. They make for a great reference when deciding which knives to buy or when researching how to roast coffee beans in a popcorn popper. :-)

You can add a reference picture for a food by simply commenting on the food itself (as opposed to the food AT a vendor).

The only remaining question I guess is about Chinatown and Little Italy. I agree with what you wrote be before about wanting to keep the neighbourhoods to a minimum so I don't mind having my precious Hintonburg bundled in with Westboro :-) But I think these 2 in particular are so well-defined and well-known that they may warrant being broken out. Otherwise, which existing area do these fall into just so I know?

EDIT : perhaps all that's needed is to define some of the locations that are there. i.e. where the borders are. Some are obvious (e.g. Kanata), but others not.

I agonized a little bit about combining Chinatown with Corso Italia too, and I might still want to separate them sometime. For now, both are lumped under "City West." If you hover your mouse over the City West tag, you see the following tooltip explanation:

"Chinatown, Preston (Bronson to Parkdale)"

Cool - crazy hoverbots!

:-)

Question for Fresh Foodie about the "buzz" section of the site.

When logged in I have the option to "Mark this page as read" but is there an option to "Mark all pages as read"?

ollie, there isn't such an option right now but I could add one. The "Mark this page as read" button at the top of the page is located in such a way that you could quite easily click it multiple times to mark many pages as read. I can see though that if you have more than a few hundred unread comments this might still be a pain. I'll add the button later this week (I'm in Toronto right now).

"I can see though that if you have more than a few hundred unread comments this might still be a pain."

Yes, that's my problem. I only log in when I want to make a post so if I go a few weeks between posts then I have a long list of unread buzz comments. So of course I just log out again. I think having this button will encourage me to stay logged in. Thanks!

That only took a minute to do! I added a button on the buzz page: "Mark ALL comments as read"

Let me know if you run into any problems!