From Tom Fitzmorris A barrage of questions about the new website have come from many readers. Many of the concerns were about the same things. That input has been very helpful in decisions about which part of this enormous project (we boast 6000 current articles here) should be done first, and which can wait until later. Let's start with something you need to do. Set a bookmark/favorite for our home page, the address of which is simply nomenu.com. Here's the status of fix-ups to the rest of the site, based on your requests: 1. Fix broken links. There were tens of thousands of these, all referring back to the old website, which was no longer plugged in. The good news is that we planned for this day long ago, and most of the links were fixed in large batches. I have no doubt that many remain to be repaired. If you click on something that's supposed to take you where you'd like to go, but it doesn't–let me know. 2. Bring back the alphabetical recipe index. Done. Click on Recipes in the index, then All Recipes, A-Z. 3. Bring back the restaurant indexes. Done. The three main lists of every open restaurant in town (alphabetical, by neighborhood, and by cuisine) are all back. Click on Restaurants in the menu. Still in the works: the lists of restaurants open Sunday, Monday, and Saturday lunch. We'll have those back up shortly. 4. Where are the Reveillon menus? The list of all of them, with ratings, is found by clicking Holidays. So is the list of restaurants open Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 5. Where Is the Eat Club schedule? Click Eat Club in the main menu. The list of reservations is there, too. 6. Where is the Five-Star Edition for subscribers? It's coming. This has, strangely, been one of the most difficult jobs in the rebuilding, mainly because we're trying to make it really spiffy. I've had to get outside help on this, but we should have it going soon. To make up, all paid subscribers get three-month extensions of their subs. 7. I can't figure out how the home page works. All the same features as before are on the page that comes up when you set your browser to nomenu.com. But instead of coming up in the same order every day, they appear as soon as I finish writing and assembling them. If you scroll down, you will find all the current articles, followed by the ones from yesterday, the day before, two days before, through some twenty or more articles. We give you the first paragraph or two, then a link (which works!) to the full article on its own page. 8. Dozen-best lists? Click Lists. First item on the dropdown. We have over 100 lists. 9. I liked the old site better. The new one is a disaster. As I expected, a lot of readers have said that. But the change had to be made. It's been almost five years–an eternity in the computer world–since we last overhauled the nuts and bolts of NOMenu.com. Some parts of the site were from the original site in the Stone Age that was 1998. More important, the old software was no longer being updated, and was liable to malware and other security issues. Another thing: we never had a very good way for readers to search the site for a specific restaurant or recipe. This new program makes that effort much easier. A surprise even to me is how easy the Comment feature is to use. We are getting many more questions and comments that way than we ever did on the old messageboard. It's now at the bottom of every single article on the site. It's easy for me to respond, so I do. I welcome your ideas on how we can better serve your needs. Write me: tom@nomenu.com. Tastefully yours, Tom Fitzmorris P.S.: The daily email newsletter will remain more or less the same, delivering today's new articles and continuing to evolve as necessary.
