This is a short note for anyone who is following the development of Local Thoughts via this blog.
Most of the posts made here so far have been about new features. While I will probably point out major new features here, the smaller changes which are made everyday will not be posted. If you see something new you would like an explanation of feel free to send an email.
And now back to your regularly scheduled blog reading…
Over the last couple of days some changes have been made to Local Thoughts. Here are a few user visible highlights.
Digg links
As an experiment, submit to Digg links have been placed at the top of each topic and city.
Each time a user ‘diggs’ a page it is like a vote. Enough votes makes a page visible on Digg’s site where lots of other users can find it. Hopefully this will help new people find Local Thoughts.
New navigation bar
Some of the buttons on the right side have been removed and replaced with a horizontal navigation bar at the top. I think this design makes these options much easier to find.
What’s new? page
A new section was added called What’s new?. This section lists, in reverse chronological order, the creation of cities, topics and feeds allowing the user to find out what has recently been added to Local Thoughts with a quick glance. The user can choose to list just cities, topics and feeds individually or they can view a combined list.
New help text
A bit of help documentation has been added. It is not nearly complete enough but it is a start. Help can be accessed from the new top menu bar.
Some new features have been added to Local Thoughts today. Besides lots of behind the scenes stuff here are a few user visible changes.
Favourites system
A new favourites system has been added. This allows users to add topics and cities to a favourites list which is available on every page making it easy to quickly navigate between them. As the number of cities and topics keeps growing manually locating topics and cities was just getting too hard. Also, the favourites bar uses Ajax to avoid reloading the topic and city pages which are often quite large.
Related tab on topics
When you view a city there is a tab available called “List Topics”. This tab gives users a list of all topics which are related to the current city (example). Until now there was no similar feature for topics. The newly added “Related” tab will list all topics which are geographically related to the current topic as well as provide a link back to the city page.
Timezone stuff
Previously all time data was displayed in EST. Now Local Thoughts has been modified to display all dates in UTC for anonymous users. Also, users who are logged in can now specify the timezone they want time data displayed in.
I think it might be useful to give people a sense of where Local Thoughts is going and perhaps collect some feedback so here is a incomplete list of features that I plan on adding as time permits.
A feed for every city and topic
Seems an obvious thing to do. The feeds will probably be in Atom 1.0 format unless someone can point to some very important client software that doesn’t support Atom.
More collaborative features
If people are going to collaborate on the lists of feeds for each city they need the tools to do so. A small part of that toolbox is in place with the history information that is attached to every topic and city. A first step will be to add a feed containing this history information. Other required features include a discussion platform where the addition and removal of feeds can be debated and a notification mechanism (email?) which will allow interested individuals to keep track of the changes made to any city or topic that they help moderate.
Favourites
It would be nice if each user could specify a list of favourite topics and cities which would be displayed in a way that makes it easy to navigate to them. Update: Since writing this entry I have mostly completed this feature. It will be made available once I am done testing.
A new look
The current look of Local Thoughts is OK but it could be a lot better. Fortunately the back-end code is almost completely separated from the theme so changing the look shouldn’t be that hard from a programming standpoint. All I need is the time and some inspiration. No matter what though, the simple nature of the site will remain. Local Thoughts is about information not glitz. It has to be just as easy to look at on the 100th visit as the first.