Suggestions for this forum

[Mark]

Hi

Please feel free to suggest anything you would like to see on this forum. It would be great to grow this as a community site so all suggestions appreciated

thanks

Mark

[Guest]

I think this is a great idea. I'm new to the area and interested in all sorts of stuff, so I hope we can get this forum up and running soon. I work from home (in Friern Road) and I'm a website editor. I'd like to find out more about all aspects of enjoying oneself in the area. Comedy, music, eating, drinking, sport, art, socialising, shopping...

Oh, and who can give me a decent haircut round here?

[Mark]

Thanks Adam, any help in promoting/contributing/helping with this site is greatly appreciated.

Haircut, my girlfriend cuts mine so I can't recommend a hairdressers locally but I've heard that Willis B on Lordship Lane is pretty good

[Guest]

Yeah Mark, it's a great idea!

Just to let people know about the new East Dulwich blog I've set up. The idea is to give reviews of local bars/ restaurants and discuss local news and goings on. www.eastdulwichlife.blogspot.com

Adam - really good hairdresser is Lacey at Willis B on Lordship Lane.

[Guest]

Forgot my suggestions! It would be good to have details of local events (live music, comedy etc.).

[Mark]

I'm still trying to find a suitable calendar that can 'plug in' to this forum so that people can enter their own events onto it. Progress is slow so if you see one that'll be suitable, please let me know

cheers

Mark

[beatnic]

Have you looked at upcoming.org from the good folks at Yahoo! or Google Calendar?

Both have a bunch of APIs that you can hook in to and display stuff on your site with.

[beatnic]

I'm beginning to wonder if the Chatter section is needed - given how much chatter there is everywhere else in the forum :-)

Mark, what do you reckon?

[Mark]

You read my mind Nic! I'm thinking of taking chatter off and replacing it with an events section (like has been mentioned before) but I'm still searching for a calendar that can plug into this Phorum without too much requirement for being a techie. In the meantime I might put the "5 latest posts" on the homepage to fill the space.

[beatnic]

Mark, 5 latest posts sounds good... as long as they're clickable :-)

[Quaywe]

Mark, it would be good if we could post images to this forum as well where relevant (i.e. selling stuff).

[Mark]

Hi EDKiwi

I'm looking into adding the 'in body image facility' but it's a bit tricky. In the meantime you can add pictures that are elsewhere on the web by clicking on the picture and entering its URL (you have to be registered to see this)

I'll try it below with a photo of East Dulwich, sorry, Sipadan:

[tomM]

I'm like a seperate 'classified/for' sale board, away from the 'recommendations/reviews' board.

The two are quite seperate, and it would be easier to quickly scan through things for sale.

thanks!

[Administrator]

Good point Tom, we'll try and set it up this week. I think we're going to lose the What's on in East Dulwich section as it's not being used. We haven't the time or money to approach people to encourage them to post their event so we can certainly put a 'classified/for' sale board up in it's place and see how that goes

thanks

The Administrator

[Huguenot]

When we link through a forum, can we link through to the most recent post rather than the first? It aids a quick ctach-up on the dialogue - and worked well when we did it on our Beijing forum (I'm back home now though!).

[Administrator]

Its a consideration that we looked into and having researched this for a previous job we know that the majority of people are used to reading down and expect replies to a message below that messages. Having said that some do like to read the last/latest message first. A Top Tip to help, on the list of topics page e.g. here, under the heading Last Post it will typically say something like:

Today, 01:17PM

Last Post by Alex

Last post is actually a link to the last post,

I hope you find this a worthy compromise

yours

The Administrator

[Guest]

Dear Mark

Great site! Can I ask - do you do this full-time or is it just a hobby? Also what gave you the idea to set it up and do you see this growing into a site where businesses can advertise?

[Mark]

Thank you Kate, I'm glad you like the site. It's just a hobby, I have a full-time Web Manager job that pays the bills, unfortunately this forum doesn't. The site came about from the fact that I'm a bit nosey and like to know what's going on, I like to whinge about things that aren't right, wanting to find out more about East Dulwich and the people that live here and, without trying to sound too sickly, I wanted to do something for the community. It's quite a busy site now and I have to do proper, mature things like weekly back-ups in case something goes terribly wrong and all the postings disappear. I also like tinkering with the site and I have to stop myself from adding unnecessary widgets and things that would just clutter it up. Simplicity works here.

Advertising, hmmm, there's a question. I am going to start allowing it for the right companies (see here on the help page) but also I want to keep the list of ten or so recommended businesses, local companies that don't pay to be listed but are just recognised as being genuinely good.

I hope that answers your question and thanks for using the forum.

Mark

[Joe likes dinner]

Mark,

Having read the number of recommendations for ''that place on X street'' or ''near goose green'', I am thinking that a taggable Google map of East dulwich / surrounding area would be really useful, and i believe not so hard to set up.

This way we can have dedicated maps for each subject, eg, eating, drinking, shopping, DIY, sites of historical relevance, routes to walk-off dinner, where the tags link through to relevant posts from the forum.

If anyone wants to see what it looks like, just go to http://maps.google.co.uk/maps and type in ''Bars SE22''.

[Mark]

Hi Joe

you're right, maps showing the local areas of interest would be useful, we've looked into various ways to improve this site and this is one of the main ones. We need to find a way to smoothly incorporate it into the forum, perhaps on the local info page have links to the various maps you listed above. It's not too hard to set up, we've got our Google API key and instructions but it takes time which we don't have especially as the day job's about to get really busy. If there's anyone out there who can help us please do let us know.

Thanks for the suggestion

Mark

[Huguenot]

When I access the forum home page (not using the back button) it tends to prioritise a version of the page cached on my PC rather the collect an updated one from the server. However, when I access other sites (such as the BBC homepage) it'll take a fresh version as a priority - is this a setting for the site that it might be worth altering?

Incidentally, did you ever get any designs for the page headers?

[Mark]

I've added a 'no-cache' directive on the pages so that your browser should collect the latest version of each page each time you visit. Hopefully. Please let me know if works or not.

I did get one logo from a lovely lady called Kelly which was a typographic mark of 'edf' which I haven't implemented. Although it was impresive it'll be good to get a few other options...

[Quaywe]

Mark, how about listing the posts in newest to oldest format (i.e. newest on top) so we don't have to scroll down to the bottom of the page past posts we've already read?

[Mark]

As mentioned above, its a consideration that we looked into and having researched this for a previous job I know that the majority of people are used to reading down a page and expect replies to a message below that message. Having said that some do like to read the last/latest message first so I've put on the list of topics page e.g. here, under the heading Last Post it will typically say something like:

Today, 03:06PM

Last Post by mockney piers

Last post is actually a link to the last post,

I hope you find this a worthy compromise

Mark

[Huguenot]

Mark, I reckon you were right to choose that, I prefer this layout now to the ones that worked the other way!

On another note I notice that our own Moriarty, the SE5 forum, allow users a photo by-line and score peeps by stars depending on their effectiveness at McDonalds. Is that quite fun?

We did this when I was over in Beijing and it caused no end of hilarity ;-)