Discussion forum

Blowing the cobwebs off the old blog here a bit .. excuse the tardiness! Focus has been elsewhere a bit (ok, a lot!) but things are still happening with TC development.

We’ve just launched stage 1 of a new discussion forum system. The very old version of the site had one, but it was pretty much a stand-alone thing which meant it took a lot of focus away from the site itself.

This time around, the discussions are embedded with the site itself. For phase 1 these are in each of the city homepages (e.g www.thursdayclub.com/london) under the ‘discussion’ tab.

All pretty simple stuff at the moment, but it’s nice and Ajaxy so doesn’t require page refreshes which will please the geeks amongst you 🙂

New topics and replies drive member update notifications for your status history too.

Future stuff will include re-editing and deleting posts, emoticons (maybe..) and a discussion homepage. Possibly embedding into other parts of the site too as it’s been written to be a fairly generic framework.

Now get posting 🙂

Paul..

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Track Your Friends Or Other Members

I’ve added a couple of new features on the homepage, which hopefully will prove useful. You can now filter the news items on the right hand side to show just news, information on other members (status updates, new interests etc), or – if you are logged in – status updates on those people who are on your friends list. You can also choose to show everything mixed together.

So, you can track when your friends log in, or see how their mood is. I’ll update the RSS feed shortly, so that you can subscribe to your friends status updates too.

Feedback or suggestions most welcome.

Paul..

Beer or Whine?

A hot topic for debate here in Sydney currently is mayor Clover Moore’s proposal for more intimate ‘Melbournesque’ bars and lounges. I have to say I am in 100% agreement with her. Sydney has some reasonable cool bars and a lot of pubs, but for great little Euro-cafes, bistros, wine bars, lounge bars, supper clubs and hole-in-the-wall cool venues, Melbourne wins hands-down.

Right now, Sydney laws mean that in addition to expensive alcohol licenses, you also have to pony up for a ‘social impact analysis’ at roughly $60,000 plus associated legal fees and other nonsense. In Melbourne, a handful of virtually penniless students could open a bar in an upturned skip at the back of an alleyway. And they do. And it works.

The crusty old folk at the AHA, who seem to be stuck in some 1960s timewarp, believe that Sydney folk don’t want to have a nice glass of wine in a small quiet bistro and that large pubs with pokies and sports on TV are what us bogans really enjoy. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong!

I’m glad to see that support for Ms Moore is coming from people like Neil Perry and other notable nightlife owning Sydneysiders too.

I do enjoy Sydney, but having recently returned from a trip to Grenoble in France, we need some good old Euro-chic. Bring it on Clover!

Speaking of travelling..

I think this may be quite an oldie, but I recently revisited World66.com to try out their ‘where in the World have you visited’ gizmo. I thought I’d been to a few places, but turns out I’ve only managed 13% of the world’s countries (29 of them). Here’s the map:

You can see how you fare here. Looks like I need to start visiting some large countries (Russia?) to get that map coloured in!

P..

Travelling

In case you were wondering where we’d gone (which I’m sure you were ..right? right? 😉 ) it’s been a month of travelling for most of us here at TC, with a bit more to come.

Steve’s been on a bit of a far-east tour, taking in Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore (where Karim and I caught up with him – hence the raft of new Singapore reviews all in one go 🙂 ). Karim’s been busy in Hong Kong, and I’m off to Denver and then Grenoble in a weeks time.

Quite a list of places to try in Denver, where we have a few venues, but no reviews. Could be a long week 🙂 As for Grenoble … well allegedly there is some life there after dark, but it’s just a flying visit, so we’ll see about that!

Later in the year, we should be updating Jakarta and Paris again, with maybe a swing through Bali if there’s time.

Of course, there’s only a small number of us and lots of you, so please keep adding those venues and reviews for all the places we can’t get to (i.e. about 99% of the world 😉 ).

P..

Google Mapplet

[update: this is now included in the Google Mapplet directory 🙂 which is here ]

If you’re a fan of Google maps, you may know that Google recently added the ability to include ‘Mapplets’ on your personal map page.

Basically these allow you to include other content that you may find useful, such as traffic, weather, real estate and – of course – nightlife!

We’ve created our own Thursday Club mapplet, which you can include on your own maps. If you can’t find it in the Google directory of mapplets, you can add it by entering the URL on the ‘add content’ page. The address is:

http://www.thursdayclub.com/city/tc_mapplet.xml

Right now the number of cities and venues is limited to a selection from the main Thursday Club site, but we’ll be adding more shortly, so you should see the list grow as you use it.

We hope you find this useful – especially when travelling or stuck in a strange land somewhere 😉

Thursday Club..

World’s coolest city 2007

Quite some time ago now we held our first ‘world’s coolest city’ vote. After a lot of interest, New York came out the winner, followed by Sydney and Melbourne. We did attempt to deliver the trophy to the New York mayor’s office, but for some reason that turned out to be rather difficult 🙂

Anyway, the coolest city poll is back for 2007. Early voting has Zurich in the lead, but plenty of time to get your votes in yet.

You can vote here.

Good luck!

P..