Major updates – news, search and more
We’ve just rolled out another major update, which changes the way you approach Plakatt. We now have a global news feed displaying recent activities on the site. Previously past events would kind of get “lost” because we would show only the upcoming on the explore page. Well, we realized that and now show past events as nicely faded items there too. Want to find a location quickly, or just vaguely remember what an event was supposed to be about? No problem, now there’s a search bar at the top-right corner ready to help you.
Here are other highlights:
- Personal pages have been redesigned, with a clever summary of activities and a clear way of seeing a person’s recent activity, plans of attending future events, attached photos and videos, and contacts.
- When exploring events, you will now see them sorted in time-ascending order, that is from closest to the far in the future. When they’re over, the past events will be shown in time-descending order, so that the recently past ones are easy to find.
- People from countries with no geographical regions, such as Montenegro and Monte Carlo, should not have any more problems using the site.
- OpenID users will feel better with ID Selector, and the way we remember your preferred login method in the cookie; the whole login page actually has less clutter.
- And as usual after a few weeks of work, there have been many minor fixes.
Sharing events across the web, messaging and boogz
We’ve added the AddThis button for sharing events and locations across the web – now anyone (including non-registered visitors) can email events to friends, bookmark them and submit to Digg, reddit and so on.
People sending messages will notice that we now turn web and email addresses into proper links, and properly quote received messages when replying.
We realized that exploring only five events or locations per page can be annoying, so number’s ten now.
Also we fixed some bugs like regarding proper handling of non-logged in people trying to access protected parts of the site, such as when viewing a received message or replying to a contact request. People for whose IP address we couldn’t guess a location in the world should not have problems accessing the site either.
Growing up
We’ve been quite busy in the past two weeks and this is what happened:
- Improved explore page – we’ve clearly unified event and location exploring on a single page, with links on the right hand side to filter entries by tag, town or country.
- We finally managed to set up a proper email server, so we now send nice emails on signup, contact requests and incoming messages.
- And we can now reset forgotten passwords too :)
- There’s a little link now to say that you love a certain location. At the moment there’s not much more to it but expect to eventually see some nice recommendations based on your taste.
- The site is now time zone aware…
- …which was made possible after we upgraded our Ruby on Rails framework to version 2.1.1. Also the whole site should feel a tiny bit snappier.
- The personal activity feed is made more readable through (again) less design.
New front page
One of the things we realized through the feedback people gave us was that it’s hard to tell what the web site is about when looking at the home page. We made the new index in an attempt to solve that. Also we pushed some smaller changes in design, mostly related to displaying events, and some fixes for bugs we noticed eg regarding displaying wrong time of comment writing and editing read-only event descriptions.
Design reset
We’ve realized that programmers devoting 5% of their time on website design won’t give good visual results, so we decided to do what we call “design reset”, and the result is plakatt‘s new look. It’s mostly about colours for now but we plan to improve some page layouts and overall usability as well.
