Urban Vancouver

Wheels in Motion

By naim786 on February 20, 2008 - 9:09pm

I think the combined distractions of work, travel, new responsibilities and my absolute addiction to the U.S. elections (yes I am drinking the Obama-Kool-Aid) I've been a little neglectful of VancouverVibe.ca and the blog. The good news is, things are back in motion! We've got a few cool new updates based on user-feedback in the pipeline and I would like to share them with you now:

• The Fancy-Shmancy Bookmarklet: Okay, it's not that fancy. Basically, if you're a Firefox or Safari user, simply drag our Bookmarklet (below) into your Bookmarks Bar. Now whenever you find a story you like, click on the Bookmarklet and it will fill in the URL and Title for you on VancouverVibe.ca and you're off to the races! What was a 3-step process is now more like a ... well ... 1.5 step process. See the main page for instructions on adding the bookmarklet.
• Straight to the Source: Now when you click on the title of a post, you're sent directly to the original story in a new window. If you want to comment or read more of the submitter's comment, you can simply click "read more". However many told us they would like to be able to see the original story right away and skip the landing page, we think you'll find this feature handy.
• You don't Vote, you Vibe: Instead of voting for a story, you "Vibe it!". Despite our traffic levels, folks don't seem turned on by "Vote", so they don't. We'll see how our users respond to this, we haven't fully nailed this aspect of the site yet. We'd love to hear your thoughts on how to make rating a story more "sexy".
• Featured Story: Occasionally we'll post an especially interesting story (usually one with the most votes/views) at the top of the page and just "stick" it there for a while. The idea here is to give unique and well-received content more publicity, regardless of where it originates.
• Feed Importer: We've had a few great bloggers manually post their content on our site on an almost daily basis. We want to make it easier for them to get their content out there. They can now opt to have their stories automatically posted on VancouverVibe.ca so they don't have to come by and manually submit each one separately. If you're a blogger, and you're interested in this feature, drop us a line (just so long as you're cool with us removing posts on VancouverVibe.ca that have nothing to do with Vancouver). Every time you post a story, within 12-hours it will automatically show up on VancouverVibe.ca with the first 150-words of your post treated as an excerpt on our site.

So there it is! New updates, just ahead of Northern Voice 2008. You'll find Kerry and myself at the event on Saturday, we're absolutely thrilled to get some of your feedback on the site, answer your questions or just make your acquaintance!