Over the weekend, we rolled out a number of bug fixes and enhancements, most relating to the news feature of the BetterOmaha site. In no particular order, here’s a listing…

• RSS feeds for news now include abstracts, images, and a link to the original article
• Beta page does a better job of “remembering” if you’ve logged in
• Leaving a comment or a review will now correctly expire the cache, so they will show up immediately under “Recent Activity”
• Across the site, we now only show “published” articles, meaning the results no longer include things like AP articles, and other non-Omaha articles.
• “Clustered” articles only show up once in the feeds and in the section pages
• Fixed the Gastronomic Fight Club source to correctly strip HTML. We will be publishing articles from that source starting today.
• The “weather icons” correctly take into account the changing of the seasons, so that it no longer shows a picture of the sun, when its dark outside.
• Other misc fixes and tweaks….

If you see any other anomolies with the news data, please let us know! Over the next few weeks, we will continue to roll out enhancements and fixes for not only that data, but the restaurant data as well.

Thanks for your continued support… Stay tuned, there are great things ahead!

Today we focused on a couple of major bugs, one of which was the RSS feeds. The feeds themselves are now a bit more valid, and are accessible even though the site is locked down with “beta”.

One of the main goals of BetterOmaha is to provide “RSS Feeds for Everything”. A couple of examples of the RSS feeds available from the BetterOmaha site:

• Articles written by Stephanie Monge (using search… feeds for authors don’t exist… yet)
• All articles in Sports
• All articles tagged with “Dining Notes”
• All articles from The Reader
• And many more!

We feel that the RSS features of the site are truly some of the most valuable advantages that the BetterOmaha site has to offer. We hope you enjoy these enhancements… Play around a bit with the RSS feeds, and let us know if you experience any problems!

While in our beta period, its especially important that we gather as much feedback from actual users as possible. What do you like about the site? What do you *not* like about the site? What ideas do you have about directions we could take the site? What *problems* are you having using the site? Etc etc etc…

These are the types of information that can truly help us make this a world-class application, that people actually *enjoy* using. Because of this, we have made it even easier to send feedback…

Merely click the “Send Feedback” icon in the upper right, and type your comments into the box! We will address each one, and update you here on the blog when their updated!

Cheers, and thanks for using Better Omaha!