Feature

Welcome to CLT Blog 2.0!

Posted on 22 Mar 2010 by Justin Ruckman

This release has been a long time coming for us. You’ll notice a lot of things different around here in terms of layout, but most important to me are some brand new features:

Hoods

Hoods are neighborhood groups, discussion boards and news hubs. Over time they’ll be aggregating news sources from around the community: neighborhood blogs, city council minutes, etc. Feel free to become a member of as many as you’re interested in to meet fellow citizens (or citizens at heart) and received tailored updates in your activity feed.

Activity Feed

Which brings me to the Activity Feed, another new feature. This simply collects all the sitewide activity — of which there is a lot more now — and puts it in one place, much like you’re already familiar using on Facebook and Twitter. You can even “like” and reply to feed items. Pretty straightforward, and to us, pretty obvious.

Expanded Profiles

Our user profiles now have all kinds of spaces for information. You can even plot your address on a map if you feel so inclined. Later we’ll be rolling out more advanced maps integration, but for now, consider dropping by your profile and filling it out a little more.

Speed

One of our biggest complaints with the old site was speed, and it’s incompatibility with older browsers or computers. This is always a work in progress, but our new site is significantly faster, now optimized and running off of Amazon Web Services. We hope to make even more improvements in this area in the next couple weeks.

Special thanks to Philip Dodds (@philipdodds) for his expertise in implementing some of our more advanced features, and migrating to Amazon.

That’s all for now. We’ll have other new features rolling out gradually now that we’ve got this major update out of the way. We’ll also probably be dropping in from time to time with some quick tutorials or suggestions on how to get the most out of this community and this website. Can you believe some people don’t know you can sign up and submit writing, photos and video right now? Yeah us too, which is something we hope to remedy.

Thanks for reading all that crap! See you around!

BTW, Snow Pigeon is a play off Snow Leopard, for those unawares. I was until just now.