Incoming!

Change of Scenery

We've redesigned some big stuff and it's ready for play. New "Add Event" forms, redesigned navigation, and experimental metro pages are all new. Also, a bunch of new API goodies. Details inside!

New Add Event Form

As the number of events on Upcoming grew, several parts of the original design have become harder and harder to use over time. A perfect example was the "Add Event" form, which used a pulldown menu for choosing a venue. That worked fine in the beginning, but some metros have thousands of venues! Not fun.

That was the inspiration for the new Add Event form, which addresses some of our long-standing complaints. Among the changes:

• Venue autocompletion. Pick a venue by typing a couple characters in the venue's name, and it will do a real-time search across all metros. No more huge dropdowns.


• Inline venue adding. If the venue you're looking for doesn't exist, click the "Add a new venue" link to open a window to add it without leaving the page.


• Better calendar. The calendar picker is much improved or you can still type right into the date fields, if you like.


• Better duplicate checking. We're doing a number of tests to find events and venues similar to the ones you're adding, which helps everyone.


• Add an event from anywhere! In the past, if you wanted to add an event, you needed to find the metro first. This was a big frustration for new users, in particular, so we've lifted the restriction and put the "Add Event" link right in the header.

Experimental Metro Browsing

We're also experimenting with ways to make events easier to browse and scan the growing database of events, starting with our metro pages. Some popular metros, like San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, were practically unreadable. Every event looked the same, listed in one long table with occasionally 10-20 active events per day.

Metro pages are now personalized to your own activity and friends, bubbling up popular events and the events your friends are going to. Each metro page is now broken out by day, with attendance affecting the size and position on the page. We're also giving more information about each event, including the venue, tags, and the list of your friends. The more friends you have using Upcoming, the more useful these pages will be.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think. This is still very much an experiment and we want suggestions.

New Header Navigation

As we kept expanding the scope of the site, we kept adding tabs and features to the top navigation, until it was getting cramped and cluttered. The new navigation tries to group similar sections together, and also adds our improved search functionality to every page. Again, we're still playing around and will be tweaking it, but we were getting impatient.

Groups, Tags, Event/Venue Editing Added to Upcoming API

Gordon made these big changes last month, but only announced it on our API developer's list. New methods were added to the Upcoming API for interacting with groups, adding/removing tags, and editing events and venues. Like always, if you have questions or suggestions for our API, join the group and let's hear it.