Just 14 days after our last release, we’re not running from zombies but instead have pushed out a new version of the site. The primary focus of this version is to streamline features, make things better and maybe add a few fancy features for you to play with.

The biggest new thing you can now do is put search results for businesses on your website in just a few seconds using the Local Search Widget we now provide. Just fill out a form and we’ll generate some code for you to paste into your own pages to immediately show a Google Map with up to 10 top businesses in the area you specify, of the type you specify. Own a hotel? Show your website visitors where the best restaurants are!

You can also quickly get directions to any of the businesses on the site with new integration into the Google Maps website - click the link below the company name on any business page, enter where you are coming from and you’ll be taken to the Google site with directions to that business.

Other more minor changes include:

• Clearer status messages when adding friends and the ability to see your pending friend requests in your Blackbook.
• Ability to tell us about poor search results using a quick form linked underneath the map when you conduct a search.
• Two new profile fields to tell people about your occupation and whether you have a family or not.
• Review breakdowns on your profile in your Blackbook tell you what kind of ratings you give overall.
• If you can’t find a business you can tell us about it in just 2 fields - company name and postcode - and we’ll do the rest to get it added to the site.
• Tweaks to the Facebook plugin to make the text showing in news feeds clearer and less wordy.
• Photos you upload to your profile will now be cropped to make sure they look nice. If you don’t want us to do this then you can use a tool such as Mypictr to resize the photo to 75×75px yourself.
• Plus bug fixes including issues with OpenID, some user’s ages showing incorrectly and improving title consistency throughout the site.

We’re pretty satisfied with the way the site is progressing and with all known bugs squashed we’re going to be working on some bigger features that you can get really excited about. In the meantime, keep reviewing those local businesses - are you in our top 10 reviewers yet?

I think it is worth mentioning that from the get go welovelocal.com has adopted microformats, cute little bits of code that sit quietly in the background making the extraction of relevant data even easier. Consider the adr microformat for example, contained within it are all a businesses address details, the phone number, street address and telephone number just to name a few.

Our microformat breakdown currently includes around 100,000 adr’s and a few thousand hReviews, all of which we hope to increase in size over the coming months.

You can learn a more about microformats over at the official microformat website.

tags: microformats

Roughly two weeks after we launched, we’ve brought out a new version. Hooray! The welovelocal developers have been beavering away, making brand new features for you to check out.

First of all is our new Locals feature, this is for registered users and can be found in the blackbook. If you’re not registered, why not? Locals helps you connect with your area - find others who love (and hate) businesses and reviews of businesses in your area. For example, I live in Angel and with Locals, I can see which people are reviewing businesses in my area. For any worried about privacy, it’s not people who live in your area, it’s people who review in your area. We don’t want people being stalked, which brings me on nicely to everyone’s favourite stalking social network…

We now have Facebook integration! Woo! You’ve probably noticed all the “applications” your friends have been adding to their profiles, well, now you can add your very own welovelocal application. Share your reviews on your Facebook profile and show off your writing prowess!

Quite a few people have been asking us for this feature, so hopefully you’ll find it useful. It’s a brand spanking new user search. Think your friend is a secret local insider? Now you can search for them and add them to your friends. You’ll find this feature in your blackbook and on the invite friends page.

Talking about search, we’ve been cleaning up our search engine. The welovelocal developer team weren’t overly happy with the old search so took it upon themselves to make it a million times better. Which is it. Try it for yourself and you should get much better results than you did a week ago!

We’ve also fixed a ton of bugs with the site too, if you notice anything out of place, please do drop us an email and we’ll do our very best to help you out. Also, if you have a super-fantastic idea that would make welovelocal 194% better, then let us know!

One of the features on welovelocal.com I am most proud of it the way we handle printing business details. It seems like a small ask, but many sites don’t get this right. You end up printing interfaces, adverts, and extra pages, just to get the three lines of information you want -it’s a pain. We wanted to make sure that not only would you only get the useful stuff, but that it would fit neatly on a page.

Try it out, we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The more observant of you may have noticed that the site is now running version 1.0.1 which means we have pushed out a minor release. This new version fixes a few bugs and adds a number of minor improvements to various features on the site. There’s nothing overly new or exciting as it’s only a small release but you may now notice things working better!

These changes include:

• The greeting top right by your username randomly changes to make your visit even more exciting.
• We fixed an annoying bug when you could be logged out after a certain period of time. We have changed the way sessions are handled so you’ll only be logged out if you stay continually browsing for a year. Let us know if this happens to you.
• Paging has been added to your Blackbook for the activity monitor so you don’t end up scrolling down miles.
• We now automatically discover the area your postcode is related to and use that for the location field e.g. Angel or Soho. You can opt out of this to have it display “I’m not telling!” instead from the Account page in your Blackbook.
• Search is now a bit faster when we’re doing a partial match for a business name. For this we have to use a MySQL LIKE wildcard query and they are notoriously difficult to optimise. Other searches (e.g. for a type, or an exact business name) will still be really fast because MySQL can use indexes for those!
• Plus a load of back end tweaks to make our life easier for managing all the data we have on record.

So now we have our first maintenance release out in the open, the next release will be to add some new features which we’re currently hard at work planning out.

It seems that as soon as Max put up the post on Gmail blocking our emails the problem just went away.  I’d like to say that it was a technical success, but that would be lying, the fact of the matter is we’re not that sure why it seems to be working all of a sudden.  The fact that we have all been marking the emails as ‘Not Spam’ for the past few days may have had an impact, but that would seem like a rather easy way for spammers to bypass the filter, and we know the Google boys and girls are a lot clever than that!

Chalk this one up to a blessing from the Google gods, it happens from time to time.  We’d still appreciate it if you double checked your spam the next time you get an email from us, and of course if you can shed any light on the issue we’d love to hear from you.

One day in and we are learning that Gmail don’t seem to like our ‘verification emails’ or ‘invite a friend’ messages, as they are consistently going into our Gmail Spam box which is a bit of a pain.

We’ve been doing a lot of testing, but we’re yet to resolve the problem - bizarrely the route of the problem seems to lie in the word ‘local’ within the verification URL.  Having tested lots of variations, this consistently remains the Gmail spam trigger, not suprsisingly ‘love’.  So if you’ve signed up  with Gmail so far and managed to scoop your verification email out of your spam filter - thank you.  We’re aware of the problem and we hope to resolve it soon, thanks for your patience.

We’re live! No Alpha, Beta or Gamma, just the finished product. Hello and welcome to welovelocal.  You may have already guessed it, but just in case - WE LOVE LOCAL.

We believe everyone’s a local expert. We all have a favourite local restaurant, know a friendly shopkeeper, or have used an ultra reliable tradesperson at one time or another. With welovelocal we want to put that local knowledge online by encouraging everyone to review and rate the businesses and services you use everyday.

By sharing our local knowledge, we can help the best local businesses stand out from the crowd, and find the right listing when looking for a business or service.  Of course we don’t all have the same tastes, budgets and levels of expectation, so by reading the profile of the person who submitted the review you can find a little more about them – the aim is to find businesses and services recommended by people just like you.

So now we’re up and running, let’s start spreading the word.  Sign up, tell your friends and family about us, and get let’s get people reviewing. By inviting people to your network of friends, you’ll also be able to keep track of their favourite places and join the welovelocal community.

You may have noticed that we currently only cover London, but don’t worry we’ll be going nationwide very soon.  We want to make sure everything is working fine, before we add more than one million businesses to our directory covering the rest of the UK.

It has taken us longer than we expected to get here, but we hope you’ll be happy with the results.  Please do let us know what you think, give us feedback, as we’ll be taking all your comments and suggestions into consideration as we continue to update and improve the site.