Food Finds

Food Finds is a wiki devoted to finding the best places to eat all over the world, from restaurants and cafes to markets, street stalls and food carts.

It was created in March 2008. Since then, users from many countries have viewed and contributed to the site. Food Finds currently has listings from 82 cities in 23 countries.

The site is hosted on the wiki farm Referata and uses the extensions Semantic Forms, Semantic Drilldown, Semantic Maps and Widgets, in addition to Semantic MediaWiki.

Use of extensions
Users can add or edit information about their favorite food spots using the main form, Good Eats. It has fields for cuisine type (with autocompletion), price range (using a dropdown with options from "Unbelievably cheap" to "Crazy expensive"), location, and links to reviews, as well as the users' own comments. There are also very simple forms that create pages for cities, states/provinces and countries, each of which shows the list of entries for that geographical area. For example, here are the food finds for New York City.

Semantic Drilldown provides a display of listings that can be filtered by location, cuisine and price range.

Semantic Maps allows users set to the coordinates for each food establishment and displays a map of all of them on the front page, on the page of every country, state/province and city, and of every establishment itself.

The Widgets extension is used in an interesting way: instead of displaying snippets of HTML and Javascript from outside websites, it is used to do string manipulation. The one widget on Food Finds is "Short link", which creates a short link to a URL, so that a URL like "http://www.example.com/someotherpage" would appear as just "example.com", linking to the original URL. URLs for links and reviews for each establishment are displayed using this widget.

Contributions welcome
The current goal of the site is simply to continue expanding its database of great places to eat. Posting on Food Finds is a great way to recognize your local favorites and to record the places you've enjoyed on your travels. And it comes in handy when friends ask you where to eat. Unlike other sites that include information and reviews on practically every establishent, Food Finds only features places that users have found noteworthy. Please feel free to add your own favorites!