There’s lots to be done on outside.in, and we’ve been compiling a steadily growing list of improvements to make, enough to keep the programming team plenty busy in the months to come.� But we really appreciate suggestions and other types of feedback from users.� What sorts of thing do you want to see on the site?� What features would you like that we’re not yet providing?� What bothers you about the site?� If you have any thoughts you’d like to express along these lines, please tell us at feedback@outside.in and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Posts FromNovember, 2006
21
Nov 06
Nov 06
Using The National Map Of Cities
Our coverage map now includes live statistics, showing the number of posts in each featured city and neighborhood. Although not all the cities are as “bloggy” as our home base of New York (yet), outside.in is already buzzing in a number of new places. Our top five cities, in order, are Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. Look to these cities for the front-runners for the Bloggiest Neighborhood award.
We’re working on even more ways to highlight what’s new and novel about your neighborhood. Stay tuned!
20
Nov 06
Nov 06
Where We’re At
We’re now officially tracking news and conversation in 51 US cities at outside.in, plus a bunch of smaller communities that you all have contributed. We created a new map that shows our overall coverage. In the next few days, we’re going to have it updated so that it shows statistics for each city: most active neighborhoods, total number of posts, etc. Some version of this is likely to become integrated into the front door of the site, since I think it will do a much better job of pushing people towards areas where we have a lot of data.
10
Nov 06
Nov 06
Quick Notes
Just wanted to jot some quick notes about a few improvements we’ve made in the past day or so.
First, we added city-wide views to outside.in. Now you can view location-based content on a city-wide level, and surf from neighborhood to neighborhood by starting out at the city level and zooming in. This was of course something we always intended to have on the site, but hadn’t gotten to it at time of launch. It makes discovering things on the site much easier – now, for instance, you can browse a city’s content without needing to know what the neighborhood names are. Check out the links on the homepage, bottom-right, to get started.
Also, we added the ability to drag and zoom the map in order to change the scope of the content. Well, honestly, that feature was always there – it was one of the original features we came up with for the site. But there was nothing on the site telling you you could do this, so almost nobody realized they could use the map to drive the content. So we added some text above the map inviting people to drag or zoom, and now people are. Think of the map as a joystick for controlling what content you’re seeing.
Finally, we bumped up the size of the font in the main column one notch. No big deal, I know, but it makes the site ever so much easier to read. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference.
More to come…
