BITPORTERS ltd.

Eight months - 10,090 lines of code - a few grand and *way* too many coffees later I’m releasing what I see as “version 1.0″ of TownRenowned. What is TownRenowned? I’d like to think its Digg + The yellow pages + better business bureau. Users submit and rank content in their towns - to get the long version - go here. To find out more about this release read the TownRenowned development blog post about it here.

I want to thank the people that helped me get to this point. Matt Brett designed this hot look - as usual he did great work and was awesome to work with. Mr. Jon Tackabury over at BinaryFortess.com (aka “the Digg Rockstar“) pitched in and helped me with some of the coding, thanks Mr. T! I also want to thank Chris Ysebert over at SockWorld - Mr. Ideas gave me some real inspiration on the features for this release. Chris pushed me to build the Facebook application which I’m sure is going to be a key feature in the next few months. I also want to thank the rest of the town managers that stuck it out through the “beta” phase where I was figuring out features and everything was up in the air.

It was a massive effort getting the site to where it is today - I almost didn’t survive the dip. I had to think long and hard if I really wanted to see TownRenowned through to the end. It was the search engine keywords that really kept me into this project — I know it’s solving a problem and I can see that in the searches people are doing. People want to know what’s good and they are searching with very loose terms like “take out elgin street ottawa” - they don’t really know what they are looking for - they need things suggested to them. And not just marketing and lame statements like “voted #1 in Ottawa” - they need some context, they need to know what’s better and what’s worse. Some people don’t want to read through pages and pages of reviews - or look at complex scores (what does 5.1/10 mean? should I go or not?), they just want to know what’s best. I think TR is well on the way to accomplishing this.

I’ll know I’ll have “made it” the first time I hear someone say “I’ve been going to the same place for years but through your site I found a whole new set of places to eat out, a new dentist, a new mechanic etc.”. I can’t wait for the day that all business owners realize that when they do poor business it will be tied to their online identity. I also can’t wait to find out what the real gems of every city are, I no longer want to look to tourist guides or advertising for this information.

So please check out the site! If your town is on the list - vote for your favourites! If not, why not become a town manager and run your own site? Also check out the new TownRenowned Facebook application - let your friends know what you’re up to!