Up until recently, the main focus in the development work on the site has been on getting the listings out to as many people as possible via the social networks where we have communities. Now, at long last, I’ve finally finished coding up the listing update facility.
If you have posted a listing on the site and need to amend it, you simply go to your listing page and choose the ‘Manage’ tab at the top of the listing. You will now find a link there to initiate the update process. When you click that link, we send an email to the email address originally posted with the listing which contains a link to a web page which allows you to update your listing, add a photo, amend the gender etc – basically whatever you need to change.
Initially at least, we won’t have an approval process, so updates you make will be immediate. The listing will retain its original web address so links to the listing you have already shared and posters you may have printed out will still point to the correct location on the site.
In addition to updating the information displayed on your listing page, we automatically send out a post to our Facebook page, and a tweet on our Twitter account to alert folk that the listing has been updated. In the case of Facebook, we also add a comment to the original post, alerting anyone who may be subscribed to the comments that the listing has been updated and that they should go check it on the main site. We also alert the search engines again to let them know that the content on your listing page has been updated and that they should re-crawl it.
If your listing didn’t originally feature a photo but now does, this photo will be also sent to our Flickr account, as well as to our accounts on Twitpic. Same thing happens if either your listing keeps its original photo or you decide to replace the original one with a better/clearer one. In those cases we also upload the new photo to Flickr but this time we also add a link to the original photo to the new photo and vice versa so folk can find any previous information that may have been added before and after the update. The photos are also reissued on Twitpic. With the launch of Google Plus, we are ceasing support for Picasa for which we have exceed our upload allowance for in any case by a factor of 4 at this point.
You may have noticed there is no mention of Bebo and MySpace in the update process described above and that is intentional. With the virtual demise of these sites in terms of their popularity here in Ireland, and with the launch of Google Plus, I feel it makes more sense at the point to put our limited resources into the communities which are thriving and engaged and neither Bebo or MySpace has ever really shone for us in terms of user engagement or interaction in any case. Eventually my intention is to phase our presence out on those networks entirely.
I hope you find the new features useful. They will also hopefully free up a little time for me to add yet more new features to the site. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a message below or drop me an email.
Tags: Facebook, flickr, found, ireland, lost, Lost and found, photos, picasa, Twitter
