IE 7 High-jacking feedburner

I downloaded IE7 Beta 2 Preview to my laptop today ( I will keep IE6 on my desktop for a while) and I must say that I like it, with one exception: it highjacks feedburner. As with this blog, many blogs allow readers to subscribe (easily) through feedburner. When you click on the feedburner counter in the right hand column you will be presented with a number of options for subscribing to this blog, unless you're using IE7. If you use IE7 you'll be prompted to add the feed to the new IE favorites manager. This is a bad idea. Granted RSS is not mainstream, (which the new IE will help) and this makes things easy, but this is too limiting. Limiting because it prevents you from easily tracking feeds across multiple computers. I'm a big fan of bloglines, mainly because I use more than one computer and like to read the same feeds on all computers. I would like to use feedburner to simply add feeds to bloglines, if I use IE7 I can't do this - I can still add feeds to bloglines, but it takes another step (or two). I now have to grab the url of the feed, go to bloglines and choose to add the feed, and finally paste the URL.
Hopefully this will be gone by the time IE7 is final.

technorati tags: IE7

Trenton, a sign of things to come.

I've added a new city to Lopico. Anyone from Trenton, NJ that would like to add their favorite local businesses to the web's most user driven local directory, can now do so.

This is just the first of 50 new cities that I plan to add over the next few months. Up next: Allentown, PA.

technorati tags: lopico, new jersey

7 in 11

Well I wouldn't say Lopico Lovers is off to an amazing start, but it's better than not having any reviews at all. So far 7 reviews have been posted in the 11 days that Lopico Lovers has been up. I wouldn't say that this is good, but at least a few people have followed the links to review a business. Of course, this is only beginning, and for right now, Lopico Lovers is not directly accessible from every page - but if you add a business or vote for a business there is a prompt asking you to review it.

Here are a few examples (when you get to the page click on the heart):

Maumelle Barbershop in Little Rock
Papa John's Pizza in San Diego
Jimmy John's in Columbus

If you have any suggestions about how to improve the review program, I'm more than willing to listen.

But, what makes it so great?

On Lopico you could previously only do three things: 1. Find Great Businesses 2. Add businesses to Lopico Listings and 3. Vote for your favorites (because of this I often said that Lopico used the F.A.V.orite system). Now, there's a fourth: introducing "Lopico Lovers" the new way to review your favorite local businesses. Lopico lovers is distinct from other review programs in that it requires you to say why you love a certain business, and also what you think could use improvement. This feature of the Lopico Lovers program is intended to create unbiased reviews. Typically on review sites reviewers tend to give either very posotive or very negative reviews; Lopico Lovers was designed to prevent biased and unhelpful reviews.

Lopico Lovers also ranks reviews based on the reviewers knowledge of the business that they are reviewing: think of it as Reviewer Rank. This feature takes responses from reviewers to two questions to determine familiarity with a particular business. I added this feature to give more insight into the value of the review. Someone may say that a business is terrible, but if they've only been there once, maybe they just had a random bad experience.

Personally I think the voting method is the easiest way to tell wether a business is good or not, but this gives you a little more information as to why something is being voted for.

For more on Lopico Lovers and Lopico in general check here and here.

technorati tags: lopico, reviews, local

Blogging about Blogging

I now remember why I initially thought using Blogger rather than hosting my own blog was a good idea: Blogger is easy. The new blog jdamer.com is up, but not much is happening with it, because it is a little more of a pain (not much more) to blog the way I'm blogging over there. Not much of a pain, and I wouldn't mind doing it that way if I were a blogger, but I'm not. I'm a web developer that happens to blog. If blogging was my main objective I would gladly use the slightly more difficult process for the tradeoff of the increased control, but I'm not a blogger.

I never thought that I would have a site that was my own name, I always find that a little egotistical, but I chose that name because it is simple and it's not trendy. Other names that I was considering (thingsTaggedLife, dig.glicio.us, and a handful of others) all seemed a little too Web 2.0 focused, I didn't want to limit my blog in that way. Anyway, if you happen to read this blog and you don't read the new blog, remember to visit Lopico Tomorrow or Thursday, because Lopico Lovers (the new Lopico review program) should launch tomorrow.