la.foodblogging

I believe that it’s safe to say that we have all had this experience. It’s Friday night, you and your dining companion are hungry and eager to have a nice dinner out on the town… and yet all that you can come up with are the same four places that you always end up at, and two of those you only go to because they are convenient, not because there is anything redeeming about their food.

Even with la.foodblogging, yelp and city search, it’s still hard to remember which of the places mentioned on those sites you want to try. Rather than relying on any one of these sites as a city guide, why not use the bookmarking tool del.icio.us to make your own city guide. You can create a city guide that shows places that you want to try, places that you want to go back to, even places that you want to avoid.

Setting this up is simple, I will go over all of the steps (there aren’t many). Click “more” to read the instructions

Setting up your account

If you haven’t already, you can set up an account at del.icio.us here:

https://secure.del.icio.us/register

After you have created your user account, you will be asked to install the del.icio.us browser extension. I suggest that you do this, it allows you to add bookmarks and access your del.icio.us page with one click.

Saving posts to your City Guide

The idea behind building a personal city guide is to collect content from various sources and save them for later. To save the post in your del.icio.us account, use the button on the top of the browser. In the case of la.foodblogging, you can click on the “save to del.icio.us” link at the top of each post.

There is an excellent tutorial about how to save items to del.icio.us here at their site:

A Guide to Saving Bookmarks

Using Tags to Make Your City Guide

Now that you have the del.icio.us basics down, you can start your guide. I am going to use an la.foodblogging post as an example. Let’s look at the recent post about Hal’s Bar and Grill.

You read the post and decide that you want to check out Hal’s for dinner sometime. Using either the link at the top of the post:

Or the “Tag” button that you installed earlier. If you do use the “Tag” button, it is very important to make sure that you are on the unique page for that review. You can get there by clicking on the title of the post. Sites may also have “permalinks” identified, which is the link to that single entry. Your address bar should look like this:

Whether you use the “Save this” link or the “Tag” button (shown above), you will get the same option screen:

The URL and the Description will be filled in automatically. The Notes give you a space to add your own, well, notes about the post. The Tags are the key to building your city guide. You assign words to your bookmark that are meaningful for you to organize your posts. For instance, in this case I have assigned the tags “goback, dinner, westside, venice, fish, $$$”. I have chosen these words so that I can find the post later by using those tags. To explain my tags:

goback: I use this tag to tell myself that I have eaten somewhere and it was good, I want to go back here. goback is all one word because del.icio.us separates tags by spaces, for instance Los Angeles should be tagged as losangeles.

westside and venice: Fairly obvious, these two tags are to narrow the location of the post. I use “westside” as the general location and “venice” to be more specific. You can also use tags like “near”, “far”, or “specialtrip” if you want to be able to sort on those characteristics later.

fish: This is a special tag to tell myself that Hal’s serves good fish dishes. If I am looking for a good place for fish in the future, this tag will highlight the Hal’s post.

$$$: This tag tells me that Hal’s is fairly expensive. I am using a four $ scale, so a cheap place would be $, moderate would be $$, and so on. The beauty of building your own guide is that you can make this rating meaningful to you. Instead of using dollar signs, you can use descriptors like “cheap” or “expensive”, or you could use ranges like “5-10″ or “20-30″ to describe what a typical meal might cost.

Another great feature of del.icio.us is that as you add tags to posts, a list of your used tags will be displayed below the tagging form and you can just click on the tags to add them to the post.

Your Post on del.icio.us

Now that you have added tags to your post, it will be saved to del.icio.us. The Hal’s post looks like this:

It’s just that simple, now your post has been added to your del.icio.us account. The next step is to use this information in the future.

Accessing Your City Guide

Ok, we’re back to Friday night and I am all out of ideas on where to eat. Luckily, I have been tagging places that I want to try with the tag “totry“. If you click on that link, you will see all of my posts that are tagged with “totry”. Also, del.icio.us makes it easy to access your tags through the url “http://del.icio.us/username/tag”, so in this case the url is:

http://del.icio.us/foodblogging/totry

So now I can see all of my posts tagged with “totry”. Now I can start narrowing down the options. Let’s say that I want to go get some sushi. There are two ways to do this. One way is to click on the plus sign next to “sushi” in the related tags list on the right side of the screen.

Also, you can use the url again to look at multiple tags. Just add “+anothertag”, for totry and sushi, it would look like this:

http://del.icio.us/foodblogging/totry+sushi

You can also use the tool bar at the top of the page to manipulate your tags:

Now I can see the posts that I have tagged, and reread the the posts to see if that’s where I am going to go that night. I can continue to add tags for location and cost to further narrow my choices.

Beyond la.foodblogging

While I would like to believe that la.foodblogging can provide all of your content needs, the reality is that this system of building your own city guide really shines when you incorporate other reviews. Use the same technique described here to tag reviews posted on other local foodblogs, or commercial sites like Yelp and Citysearch. Planning a trip to another city? Start marking reviews in New York or San Francisco.

Again, make sure that when you tag a review, you are linking to that specific post, and not to the general website. Otherwise, you may have trouble retreiving the information that you need.

Conclusion / Appendix

In conclusion, I hope that this is a valuable, step by step tutorial on how to make your own city guide. This is not a groundbreaking technique and is extremely simple to execute. My goal here is to explicitly lay out how to keep your own list of places where you want to eat. Your comments and correction are much appreciated.

As a sort of appendix, I am suggesting a few tags for you to use on your posts to help you get started:

totry: Probably the most powerful tag. This tag will let you look quickly at places that you read about and want to go to, but haven’t been to yet.

goback and dontgoback: Use these tags for places that you have been to been to and that you do or do not want to go back to. Sometimes you don’t want to go somewhere new, you want to go somewhere that you know is a good choice.

location: I suggest that you be both general and specific for this tag. For instance, if a place is in Santa Monica, I may use the tags “losangeles”, “westside” and “santamonica”. That way I can search for things in general or specific terms. You can also use relational tags like “close”, “far”, “specialtrip”

cuisine: Use tags to describe the type of food in both general and specfic terms. For sushi, you may want to use “Japanese”, “Sushi”, “fish” and even “tempura” if that is offered at the specific place you are talking about.

cost: I don’t use this tag as often as I probably should, sometimes this information isn’t available from a review. Decide if you are going to use a symbolic rating, such as $-$$$$, a descriptive rating, such as cheap-expensive or a quantitative rating, such as under$10-over$40. The nice thing about this guide is that you can use tags that mean something to you, you can decide what is cheap and what is expensive according to your own budget.

Those tags should get you started, if you have come up with some useful tags, please let us know in the comments.

By Jonah (see more of his posts). Jonah is the founder of la.foodblogging and also created Digesty, a food blog aggregator and Cheww.com, a spam free foodblog search engine.