[2482] in Vegetarian_Support_Group
Fwd: The online Regional Vegetarian Guide
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (redi@MIT.EDU)
Tue Sep 23 09:07:03 2003
From: redi@MIT.EDU
Message-ID: <1064322256.3f7044d0056f4@webmail.mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 09:04:16 -0400
To: veg@mit.edu
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
This sounded cool...
----- Forwarded message from Dave Rolsky <dave@ca4a.org> -----
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2003 05:29:32 UT
From: Dave Rolsky <dave@ca4a.org>
Reply-To: Dave Rolsky <dave@ca4a.org>
Subject: The online Regional Vegetarian Guide
To: MIT Vegetarian Group <veg-request@mit.edu>
Dear MIT Vegetarian Group,
I'm writing to tell you about the (somewhat) new online vegetarian
guide at www.regveg.org, created by Compassionate Action for Animals
as a tool any organization can use to promote vegetarianism.
This site is a nonprofit, community-maintained resource which aims to
provide a comprehensive listing of vegetarian/vegan-friendly
restaurants, grocers, coffee shops, etc.
The site has been live for several months, and has been slowly
growing. Right now, we have over 200 entries across the US and
Canada. A third of these are for the Twin Cities, Minnesota, which is
where we're based. We really want to greatly expand the guide's
coverage and we're trying to get regional organizations like yours,
to participate in this.
Any user can register an account and start adding new entries, as well
as submit suggestions for existing entries. Users can also rate and
review entries.
The guide has a lot of other cool features. Searching for entries can
be done by navigating through our location system, or you can search
for all entries within a specified range of a zip code. There are
also lots of ways to narrow searches (smoking/non-smoking, restaurants
only, "is it open for the next hour?", and many more).
One feature we're currently working on that we think will be exciting
for many organizations is a generating printable versions of the guide
as a PDF. Users will be able to select a set of locations to be
included, so veg organizations could generate their own printed guides
for their region. We also plan to add customization features so each
organization can have their name on the printed guide.
Because we want this project to benefit the entire vegetarian
community, all the data on our site is freely usable under the "Open
Content License". This license means that anyone can take our data
and re-use it however they want. See
http://www.regveg.org/license.mhtml for details.
We also want to offer "skin-ability" features, so other organization
could point to a version of the guide that uses their logo, name, and
colors. We just need a few initial test subjects to develop this
feature effectively.
We really hope that you're as excited about the potential of this site
as we are. We are committed to the ongoing development of the site,
but we really need the whole vegetarian community to add more
information to the site in order to make it a truly comprehensive
resource.
Dave Rolsky
----- End forwarded message -----
