Improving blogger-friendliness

This is just to let you know, that if you would like to post to your blog from Lovento, you can now also choose the blog you want to post to (in case you have more than one). Thanks to a modest little Ajax script, this works smoothly without reloading the page.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, blog, Web2.0,
Atom API

Sneak Preview!

As some of you already knew, it is time for a new design. Yes, we know, the old design was kind of old-fashioned. We are still working on this, trying to make the interface much easier and more intuitive, but if you want you can already take a glance on how Lovento may look like in 2006. Comments and criticism are, as always, very welcome. Apart from the design nothing will change, don't worry the functionality will stay the same (and it will always remain free). We hope it will be more fun for you to use the site. Consider it as a New Year's gift. :-)

Tags for Venues and Events

We thought about adding tagging for venues and events. However, we already have a well-tested categorization scheme. Since the page is available in multilanguage the implementation of tagging is not straightforward. But if you really really want tags please let us know.

Flickr gallery support

Ok, many of you guys out there already have a nice set of photos on flickr, so why should you upload them again? It is now possible to integrate your flickr gallery easily into your profile. To make life easier for you, Lovento will try to autodetect your flickr username by using your email-address. If this fails you can still set it up manually. Once the setup is successful you will find a small flickr button linking to your gallery.
Technorati Tags: Flickr, blog, Web2.0

Multilanguage Support

As most of you probably have already found out, Lovento is available in four languages: English, German, Spanish and Catalan. We have finally implemented the detection of language settings, which the user has specified in his browser. If the language is none of the four it will default to english.

Advanced AJAX support

We have done a lot of conversions of pop-up based user interactions to more intuitive AJAX-based behaviour on Lovento. This is probably a somewhat incomplete and inaccurate list, but gives an idea how the user interaction has improved due to these changes:

• Submitting events is now way easier. One can enter the name of the venue, the event takes places and list of matching venues will appear magically. It is however still possible to enter the basic information about the venue by hand. See our ass-kicking submit-event page.
  
• Adding events to the list of favorites. Page does not need to be reloaded. Instant feedback.


• Adding a user to the list of friends.


• Removing a user from the friend list.


• Ratings of special categories.


• Checking if a username is already in use during sign up.


• Removing a venue from the list of favorites.


• When the country is changed in the drop-down box, the list of cities is automatically updated without reloading the page.


• The XML-list of flickr-photos for cities/user galleries are loaded via AJAX and displayed by JavaScript

Technorati Tags:
Web2.0, blog, Web20, Ajax, Webdev

Lovento became blogger-friendly II

After pressing the "Blog it!"-link in the top menue of the venue, one arrives at a page that looks like this.

We have added and tested support for the new Atom based Blogger API, the TypePad API and the generic MetaWeblog API which we have tested with Wordpress and Drupal. Everything seems to work fine, what is missing though, is to send a trackback ping directly back to Lovento, in order to list the blog post directly on the venue page. This will be implemented soon. even the trackback function.

Technorati Tags: Web2.0, blog, Web20

Lovento became blogger-friendly I

It is now possible to use Lovento's built-in trackback function. In the description of venues you will now find a trackback URI of the location, so if you decide to blog about a specific place, you can notify us about it and links to your blog will automatically shown on the venue-page.
Technorati Tags: Web2.0, blog, Web20

It was about time

to setup the official blog for Lovento.com. We have been online since July now and enjoyed an increasing interest and a steady growth. The site is designed to give the possibility to organize events, find venues and people to meet with. The primary philosophy is to maintain a social spirit, i. e., everybody can post venues and event and send digital invitatons to friends. In this blog, we will keep you updated about new features or issues related to the site. We are still in a beta phase and rapidly removing bugs and improving the usability, however there might still be problems in some of the Web-services that we offer, so comments are highly welcome.