Onmydoorstep.com.au - News / Blog

New Search Features

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:23:21 GMT

We've had search on the site for about 6 months now, and our activity logs show that it's used quite a bit.

However, we'd be the first to admit that our site search feature left a lot to be desired, and typically a Google site search would give far better results than our own search.

Well we've rolled out a batch of changes today to address this, with our new search feature that's available on every page. You can see it up there, to the top right of your screen.

The new search provides snippets of each result, and allows you to filter by result types.

This is another important step in our transformation from a Victoria-only site to an Australia-wide site. Some of the changes for the search functionality have include internal additions to support multiple states. We hope to go Australia wide in the next few months, so stay tuned...

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New feature now live - User Stories

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 07:05:08 GMT

We've just set a new feature live - User Stories.

User stories allow you to share your anecdotes, stories and experiences relating to both heritage listed places and events in your community.

We noticed that many of you have interesting things to share about particular places or events that are important to you, but up until now there wasn't a good way to share these with others.

User stories are designed to meet this need.

So go ahead, and share some stories about the places and events near you!

You can access this feature from any heritage listing page or event page. We will also include this functionality in the future, where appropriate for other types of listings as well.

Looking forward to reading some interesting stories over the coming months!

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Event Editor Improvements

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 23:26:19 GMT

I just rolled out some changes to the event editor which are designed to make it more user friendly for first-time users.

I've noticed that many of the people adding scheduled events are having trouble, particularly with events with complex schedules like "3rd Sunday of the month".

So there's two main changes been made

To make it clearer what the two different "monthly" options do
To make it clearer what how the "end date" functions in a schedule, i.e. it sets the end of the period over which you'd like the schedule to repeat

Here's a picture of new schedule editor.

Note that the editing of non-scheduled events has not changed.

Hopefully this will make it easier for those organising or adding repeating events to get the details of the listing entered accurately.

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Now Looking for Image Contributions

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 00:26:18 GMT

We quietly rolled out a new feature earlier this week to allow everyone to add images to both Events and Heritage Listings. We'll be expanding this to include other elements of the site in the future.

Uploading images is easy - simply click the link in the events pages or heritage listing pages to upload up to 10 images at a time.

For example, I uploaded some images from the Tesselaar Tulip Festival from a few weeks ago. I was able to take some great photos (and eat some great poffertjes) and was fortunate to have beautiful weather that weekend.

I have some other exciting news as well - we're going to be expanding to cover the rest of Australia over the coming months and the first steps towards this roll out have been happening behind the scenes.

Each state will come online separately, so that we can ensure that the quality of our data set is of the same standard that we have for Victoria at the moment.

Looking forward to making the site a truly Aussie experience that everyone can enjoy!

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Schedule Your Events

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 02:34:40 GMT

Last night we rolled out a major new feature - scheduled events.

This allows everyone to list events on the site which repeat on a regular basis, e.g. montly, weekly, fortnightly, annually, etc.

The system is flexible enough to support "day of week" style monthly listings too, such as "1st Saturday of each month" or in the case of Melbourne Cup, the first Tuesday in November each year.

Here's how the schedule is configured when adding an event -

I've added a bunch of regional farmer's markets to the site using this new feature, and I hope it paves the way for many more smaller organisations to list their regular community events on the site!

If you have any feedback about this new feature (or any others), please get in contact or use the feedback link in the "More Information" section of the footer.

View the comments and join the conversation on the blog page...

Search now live!

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 06:50:37 GMT

Today we set another major feature live - something that's been planned since the major UI overhaul a couple of months ago - Search!

Now when you go to the front page of the site, or to one of the three new sub-pages (Events, Heritage Listings, Local Questions) you will be presented with a search box.

Use this search feature to look for any content that you're after across the site.

The search is designed to be simple to use, and we think it will significantly change the way that you use the site and find the content that you're interested in.

For example, if I was interested in finding out more about "Clayton", I could search for "Clayton" and be presented with these results -

Clayton, 3168 (Location)
Clayton Street Festival (Event)
Clayton Railway Station (Heritage Listing)
Does anyone know a good lawyer? (Question)

This gives me an immediate overview of stuff I might be interested in, in this area.

This is step one is a series of changes which will transform the cross referencing and relational aspects of the site. While the site started out as a series of pages about suburbs across the state, our intention is to turn the site into a more targeted, cross referenced index of places of interest where you can interact with others in a social way.

Anyhow, we hope that you find the introduction of search to be a useful improvement to the site, and we welcome any feedback - use the feedback feature on the left of every page to make a suggestion or comment.

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We Want Your Feedback

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 11:36:05 GMT

The last few months have brought a lot of new features and enhancements to the site, and we have a bunch more planned.

But, we'd also like to gather some feedback from you.

We'd like to know about -

problems you've had using the site - not just bugs, but also anything you've had trouble understanding or using.
things that you think are missing
ideas you might have for new features to expand on the current site

To facilitate this we've set up a "user voice" forum. This forum can be accessed from anywhere on the site, by clicking the red "Feedback" link on the left of the page.

It can also be accessed directly here.

You can create new items you'd like us to look at, and you can also vote on existing items to tell us what you think is important.

Let us know what you'd like to see and whether you like what you've seen so far... looking forward to some feedback!

View the comments and join the conversation on the blog page...

New to the site - Heritage Locations!

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 02:11:53 GMT

This morning we rolled out a major new feature for the site - Heritage Listed Locations for the whole of Victoria!

These listing pages include all the heritage sites in the Victorian Heritage Database.

There is information and pictures for many of the sites, and we've also included links to nearby suburbs/towns and other heritage locations.

These pages are also integrated across the site into the history section of each location and into the "Heritage Map" on the Activities page for each location.

It's certainly been interesting for us to browse around the state using this new feature - hopefully you will find it interesting too!

Here's some interesting places to get you started -

Flinders St Station - a Victorian icon.
Princess Theatre - One of Victoria's oldest theatres.
Luna Park - St Kilda's amusement park, built in 1912.
Oakleigh Motel - Victoria's first motel.
Beechworth Cemetary - an intact mid-nineteenth century goldfields cemetery.
Horsham Theatre - one of the earliest surviving and largest purpose-built cinemas in rural Victoria.

View the comments and join the conversation on the blog page...

The New OnMyDoorstep.com.au!

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 09:55:08 GMT

Unless you're a new visitor to the site, you'll probably notice things are looking a little different!

I'm pleased to present, the new and improved "On My Doorstep" - the result of a complete overhaul of the entire user interface of the site.

There were quite a number of reasons that led to this, but primarily we wanted to make the site -

More friendly across browsers, computers and other devices
Easier to maintain and extend

The new UI sets a new standard for the design of the site, and one that we can build on more easily to add new features.

The UI isn't the only thing that's changed, we also added new features, such as the password recovery feature for user's that have forgotten their passwords, home locations for user accounts (something that we'll be integrating across the site in over the coming weeks) and the new contribution agreement.

There were also a lot of internal changes to improve the administration of the site and to more easily generate things such as the "user activity" feeds on the user account pages.

We also squashed a lot of bugs, and you should find the Internet Explorer experience to be much improved.

Anyway, here's to a bright future for the site, we hope that everyone likes the new design! :)

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Notice Anything Different?

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 10:05:52 GMT

Things have been a little quiet on the site over the past couple of weeks.

For one thing I've been taking a much needed break from adding new features and working on the site.

Secondly one of the things that had become apparent was the the speed of the site was not favourable when compared to other sites on the Internet. There were some good reasons for this, but we've re-evaluated some of our thinking around them.

The result is the dramatic improvement of the site's speed. Here's our Google Webmaster benchmark for average page load time - notice the sudden drop towards end of July?

One primary change was the removal of the localised banner satellite images for every location, which would appear at the top of the screen.

This was the primary cause of long loading times for each page, and while it was a really nice feature from a visual perspective, it did degrade the user experience for what is ultimately a purely cosmetic thing. After some deliberation we removed it, however the banner area is something that will continue to change in the coming weeks as it becomes something more useful and functional.

We also did some optimisations around the reduction in number of HTTP requests for a full page load, and inline of image data for browsers that support it. The net result is that our performance falls into what you would call "average to good", particularly given the complexity of some of our pages.

That said, we'll continue to refine the performance over the coming months, and try to keep it as a feature that is factored into future design.

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Added To Events - RSS Feeds!

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:58:30 GMT

We've just rolled out a new feature in the Event page and Event editor - RSS feeds.

You can now add one or more RSS feeds against an event, and keep people up to date automatically on what's happening.

An RSS feed may provide updates from -

A blog or website
A Twitter feed
A podcast or news bulletin
Anything else that can provide a standard feed!

If you add multiple feeds then they will be sorted into a single news stream against the Event, so people can see the latest updates first.

We've already added feeds for the upcoming events Taste of Melbourne and The Falls Festival so check them out for an example of this feature.

The event pages will be undergoing a some cosmetic enhancement in the near future to better accommodate these extra details, however we're rolling this out now, because our motto is "ship early, ship often".

Got any feedback? Post it below.

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Email Features Added To On My Doorstep

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:49:12 GMT

One of the omissions of the site when it launched a few weeks ago, was that you could ask a question, but you had no idea when someone had answered it!

Similarly, you couldn't discuss events, or find out when people were discussing them.

This was something that we were well aware of, but something that unfortunately didn't make the cut in time for submission to the AppMyState competition.

Now however, these features have been added!

Now you can get notified when -

Someone answers your question
Replys to one of your comments
Leaves a comment against a question or answer or event that you added

This will also carry over to upcoming features so that when someone responds to you, you find out about it!

We also understand, that not everyone likes receiving email. So with that in mind, you can disable these emails with one checkbox, in your profile screen.

For Facebook users - this feature won't be enabled until you've logged in through the updated login process.

If you have any comments, suggestions or feedback about these new features, then just leave a comment below!

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Facebook Login Changes

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:32:02 GMT

The majority of the users of the site use the Facebook login feature to login.

We implemented this feature because On My Doorstep is a community site, and we want you to bring your community to the site, and Facebook is the easiest way for you to do that.

Recently Facebook announced its new "Graph API", and also made some changes to the way that external applications access their users' data.

Well we've now completed the changes necessary to utilise the new Facebook Graph and OAuth 2.0 authentication standard to log you in with your Facebook account.

Due to the changes we now also have to ask you for two extended privileges when you log in:

Email address
Ability to post an update to your stream

In the interest of being transparent, I'd like to explain why we ask for these additional privileges.

We require an email address, because without one, we have no way to get in touch with our users. This doesn't mean that we will send you any email if you don't want us to. But it also gives you a way to recover your account or contact us for support should you have problems, and for us to verify your identity, that we can't necessarily get otherwise.

We also ask that we can post to your stream, so that when you post a question or add some content to the site, we can let your friends know about it, and hopefully get you a response faster.

This feature has not yet been implemented and will be an optional feature that you can keep it disabled if you'd prefer not to use it.

In the future we are intending to support OpenID authentication as well, so if you'd prefer to log in with your email provider's account (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo) or Twitter or a custom OpenID provider then you can do that too.

If you have any concerns or comments about these changes, please let us know in the comments, or send us a message via the support page.

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Our Collective Doorstep

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 10:41:01 GMT

Welcome to the Blog!

The new onmydoorstep.com.au blog and discussion features are some of the many new features that are going to start showing up on the site in the coming months.

Being the first blog post, I'd like to take this opportunity to talk a little about the site and its goals.

In designing the site, we wanted to make a place that local Aussies can come to, to find out about their community and interact with other people nearby. This isn't something that has been nailed by any other Australian site to our knowledge, at least not in the way that we imagine it.

At the moment we are still developing, and adding in the features that will really make the site a success.

More features to help promote good content and collaborate with other users will be rolling out gradually over the coming weeks and months.

If you want to know more about the specific history and workings behind the site, and haven't already, go have a read of our About page. If you're organising or attending a local event or festival, consider publicising it. Or if there's something that's been bugging you for while, why not ask a question of your neighbours?

Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks. If you'd like to keep up to date with all the latest improvements, then go ahead and use the subscription links to the right.

And finally, if you have any feedback about the site, or ideas for improvements we could make, then please leave your comment below.

View the comments and join the conversation on the blog page...