We’re excited to announce that today we are launching a brand-new version of outside.in, one that has been months in the making. This new site, you’ll find, is smoother, easier to find information on, easier to participate in, and just plain more fun to use.

Like all big changes here, it started with a simple idea and snowballed into a full-blown site overhaul.

Back in mid-summer, we thought it might be useful to put a topical keyword above each headline on the home page – this would give context to each story and encourage people to spend time exploring the stories in their city by topic. But this single change quickly opened the door to a whole slew of ideas, most of which we now present to you today. These include:

- A tabbed home page that allows you to view Stories or Places in your area. Stories are, well, stories (blog posts), and Places are the current bloggiest places in your area. So if something big is going on at a venue in your neighborhood and everyone is blogging about it, that venue will pop up to the top of the Places tab.

- “Hot Topics” story clusters. On the homepage we now cluster stories by topic, then show you the topics that are the hottest in your area for the day. This way you can see at a glance what is on the collective mind of your city, and explore that more easily. Of course the regular old ‘Top Stories’ are still there, so if you want you can read those, too.

- Sparklines. Along with each of these Hot Topics, we present a really cool, small graph to show you how popular that topic has been in your area for the past 30 days. With a quick glance you can see the history of that topic and know if it represents an ongoing discussion or something that just suddenly popped onto the radar in your area.

- Map view. The “Expand Map” link above the home page map reveals a version of that page that displays the stories and places on a big map! We still love the small map on the main home page, but decided that big maps do have their merit, and being a site about location, we should probably have one somewhere on the main page. So now you can explore the news in your area in text view or in map view.

- Improved navigation. Doria Fan, the design brilliance behind outside.in, put in a lot of work making it easier for you to find your way around the site. Note the new “Explore Neighborhoods” and “Change City” links above the map. Note also the “Contribute” link and the “My Stuff” link at the top-right (latter only visible if you’re logged in). The site is starting to feel like a *real* web site, with real navigation.

But the BIGGEST change with the site is that (drumroll…) we moved from PHP to Ruby on Rails. That’s right, we rebuilt the entire site from the ground, up for this new version. Cory and Christian, who led the way in the code transition, will explain the reasons for the change as well as the results in an upcoming blog post, so I won’t go into details here. Suffice it to say everyone here is excited about what the transition means for the site.

In general, this overhaul is part of an ongoing effort on our part to make outside.in more useful to you. In this version, that means giving you ways to see more of the big picture about your local area in a single glance. We’re moving away from simply focusing on individual stories in your area, toward focusing on wider trends that may be difficult to spot with the naked eye, and distilling those for easy consumption. As we do that, outside.in becomes much more than the sum of its parts – it becomes something you really can’t get anywhere else.

The site is to be considered ‘extreme beta’ for the next week – if you come upon any sudden cliffs or unintended swerves in the road, please notify us and we’ll get it fixed right away. Once we get through this beta period, we’ve got some REALLY exciting things to launch. So now let’s get on with it!