Brownstoner 2.0 Coming At You Today
After months of planning, we’re going to be launching the first significant upgrade of the site later this morning. While the overall look at feel won’t change too much, there will be a few noticeable differences: 1) readers will be able to create user profiles that track their comments, forum posts and responses to forum…
After months of planning, we’re going to be launching the first significant upgrade of the site later this morning. While the overall look at feel won’t change too much, there will be a few noticeable differences: 1) readers will be able to create user profiles that track their comments, forum posts and responses to forum posts; 2) registered users will also be able to upload photos to the forum; 3) all the renovation blogs will stream into a centralized reno blog so you don’t have to (though you still can) check each one individually. In addition, we’ve tried to make searching the site’s archives by topic and neighborhood a little easier. Oh yeah, the site should load faster too.
While we encourage everyone to sign up for a profile and use it as the primary way to interact with the site, it will still be possible to make anonymous comments. That said, anonymous comments will appear in a lighter font than comments from logged-in users. The hope is that regular commenters can establish credibility (and not have their identities stolen) while purposefully disruptive anonymous comments can be easily spotted and discounted.
This first step into a web 2.0 world will lay the groundwork for a bunch of other new functionalities in the upcoming months, including the ability for anyone to start a renovation blog and the creation of a map-based archive of the 2,000 or so property-related posts we’ve written over the past two and a half years.
The site upgrade will start around 10:30 this morning. Access to the site should not be interupted, but any comments or forum posts made between that time and when we tell you it’s complete (hopefully only a couple of hours) will be lost.
Look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback.
Mr. B
@Bob Marvin, that issue should be fixed now!
I set up a profile, but when I tried to enter my neighborhood, I got “Error: Invalid value “Prospect Lefferts Gardens” for profile field: Neighborhood.”
I know PLG doesn’t get much respect here, but REALLY 🙂
Or, is it just that none of the neighborhood names on the profile set-up page don’t yet work?
Great idea Jon–I wondered what was happening when I couldn’t connect to Brownstoner earlier today.
BTW–what’s wrong with giving away your real name?
Love it! I have only one complaint — where is ‘Gowanus’ in the list of Brooklyn neighborhoods for my profile? We may be the seedy underbelly, but our canal built this borough! And our Lowe’s and Home Depot are building many of your homes.
Jon/David,
One quick usability issue:
Can you control session timeout settings?
If so, it would be great if you could change the settings to allow for longer sessions, say…24 hrs before inactivity timeout.
It appears to be set to time out (and punt you back to anon/unlogged mode) after only ~20 or 30 minutes of inactivity, and it’d be much better to push that wayyyy out so users don’t unnecessarily have to keep logging in several times per day.
Like many, I keep this open in a tab that I check in on from time to time during the day, and having to log in each time I want to comment would be a bit of a nuisance.
Am guessing others would prefer to avoid this as well.
Thanks!
Is this the new version???
This lighter type is quite snappy!
Or is it?
In, beatch!
Bam. I’m in.