Site suggestion: restaurant randomiser! [Site]

2007 Jul 27
Jimmy and I are sitting here trying to decide where to go for dinner (it's too hot to cook in our 900 sq foot apartment). We're trying to find a place by poking around the site, but we don't really know what we want, just that the top 20 restaurants on the front page aren't where we want to go.

So I had this idea...what about a restaurant randomizer? Just click a link and the server will send up a completely random restaurant profile :) What does everyone think?

2007 Jul 27
In your situation, I usually just look at the wish list in my profile to see which restaurants I want to try. At least that way I know I'm choosing from a pre-screened list!

A completely random restaurant suggestion would likely produce an unwanted result most of the time. That means you'd be sitting there with a bored look on your face, clicking "Restaurant Randomiser" over and over again until you either find one you like or give up and go to Swiss Chalet. ;-) That said, I think it would be neat to have a random restaurant appear on the home page just to keep things interesting. You could just keep hitting reload and then go to Swiss Chalet. ;-)

I agree that it would be useful to have a way to help you figure out where to go. Like filtering your wish list and/or your favourites with tags: "Restaurants in my wish list that are in Barrhaven" or "My favourite Italian restaurants." This is certainly something I'm thinking about.

Thanks for the suggestion!

2007 Jul 28
Yeah, I did check out my wishlist - and your wishlist/favourites, and Candice's wishlist/favourites, and the wishlists/favourites of a few other foodies who seem to be on the same wavelength as Jimmy and I, but all I could come up with were places like Genji (Jimmy hates seafood) and Beckta/Urban Pear/etc (too pricy & formal for how we were feeling last night).

Even if I just kept clicking the restaurant randomiser (or refreshing the homepage) it would be better than trying to navigate through everyone else's profiles and then ending up making pasta at home as we did last night ;)

Thanks for all the awesome work you do, FF!

2007 Jul 28
...maybe the answer is a randomiser that gives a higher weight to places in people's wishlists?

(Yes, FF, we all assume this is your f/t job. :-)