YourStreet Blog

YourStreet Introduces News Filters

YourStreet now has news filters available.  For any location on the site you will see a drop-down menu allowing you to view Business, Crime, Entertainment, and Sports news.

So if you're in San Francisco and just want to just view entertainment news, select Entertainment from the drop-down menu and - voila! - the page reloads to just display entertainment info.  Select All News from the menu to go back to the unfiltered view.

We're still working on perfecting the filtering, so you may see a few miscategorized articles here and there.  You also will find some areas with no Crime news.  We're continually adding new sources of information and hope to have all categories of news filled in for nearly every location in the near future.

As always, let us know what you think of the filters by leaving a comment here or using the feedback form at the bottom of every page on YourStreet.

Improved Functionality on YourStreet

Over the last month we have been quietly rolling out some improvements to the user experience on YourStreet.  Here's a few of the things that have been introduced recently:

• More informative tooltips.  When you mouse over a map pin you'll now see the headline of the article or discussion, allowing easier and faster exploration of the map.  As before, clicking on a map pin gives you more information and a link to the content.

• Comment previews.  You'll now see a real-time preview when you leave a comment on an article or discussion.

• Subscribe to discussion threads.  When you create a conversation, you now have the option of having new comments emailed to you so you don't have to keep checking back to see if someone responded.

• RSS subscriptions for discussions and articles.  There's now an RSS feed for every article or conversation on the site.  Want to follow an interesting conversation?  Just subscribe to its RSS feeds and follow the comments in your favorite feed reader.

• Flagged content.  If you see an inappropriate comment on YourStreet, there's now a "flag content" link that you can click to report it to us.

• Faster site loading.  You'll notice that the article list now loads before the map so you can see more content quickly.

We're working on a bunch of even bigger improvements which we'll be announcing in the next few weeks.  Is there a specific change or improvement that you'd like to see on YourStreet?  Let us know on the comments, or use the feedback form on YourStreet.  We'd love to hear from you.