Here’s how to get started:

Let’s say you want to add a list of the restaurants in Boston’s Back Bay to your website. All you’d need to do is go to that page on CitySquares and click the Get this Feed button. Once you click that you’ll be able to copy it into your clipboard and do any one of the following:

1. Use Your Blog Platform: If you use a blogging platform like Wordpress or something similar, you should be able to add a Feed Widget to your sidebar. If you can do that, just paste the feed link into that widget. Your blog’s CSS will take care of the formatting for the feed and control how it’s displayed.
2. Get a Free Widget: If you’d like to use a third party RSS widget, there’s a bunch of options out there. One in particular at SpringWidgets is pretty good and its free, but there’s others freely available. Just Google for RSS widgets and you should get plenty of options. Once you find the widget you like, enter the feed link provided to you on CitySquares.com, then grab the snippet of code provided by the widget, and drop it into your website code.
3. Build it Yourself: If you’re a developer or you know what you’re doing, you can get a lot fancier, and you can control the look and styles for the feed on your website. Just grab the RSS feed link and have at it!
4. Subscribe: If you’re not looking to do something like this on your website, but instead you want to just subscribe to one of these feeds, that’s quite simple too. All you need is an RSS reader like any of the free ones out there.

The lists of businesses in these feeds are set up to rotate quite regularly, basically whenever business content is updated on our site, it’ll update in the feeds. This way you get a fresh list of businesses on your site, as businesses are added or edited on CitySquares.com. And based on how you choose to integrate these feeds into your site, you can choose to only display a list of businesses, or a list with verbose information about them. It’s up to you! For an example, look on the right side of this page for a list of South End, Boston Restaurants, where CitySquares is headquartered.

This is just the first implementation of RSS feeds for publishers and we’re interested in your feedback before we kick it up a notch. Please feel free to report any troubles, or submit your comments, suggestions, etc., below.

Thanks and happy feeding!

To get started, just click on the blue Facebook Connect button that’s at the top of every page on CitySquares.com. The pages that follow are very straight-forward, and within just a minute or two you’ll be good to go.

While implementing Facebook Connect we were able to effectively re-engineer the user profiling system that’s native to the CitySquares website (built on Drupal). This is a good thing, because it will allow us to start doing much fancier things. It opens the door to a more robust Facebook integration, as well as Twitter and soon much more.

The Local Web and the Social Web are related. OK they’re not sisters, but they’re definitely cousins. The now and the future of local will see much more social features and functionalities. Some of the things we’re working on now, and plan on launching shortly, include a more robust Facebook Connect integration so that, for example, when you leave a review on CitySquares.com for a local business, your Facebook wall will be updated with something like a snippet of the review and a link to it on CitySquares.com. Same for when you give a business a star rating, or even if you contribute content in other ways, like adding news, an event, or useful information about your community and neighborhood. We’ll also allow businesses to create fan pages through their CitySquares account.

We’re also going to be rolling out a Twitter integration shortly, for both users and for businesses. There’s a whole strategy we’re going to evolve that into for community and neighborhood pages, to effectively create a waterfall of real-time locally relevant information that both pulls content in, and distributes content out. I know that sounds a little too conceptual, but hang in there – you’ll see what we mean very soon.

We hope you like what we’re doing! Stay tuned, there’s a whole bunch more coming soon. We welcome your feedback and suggestions, feel free to leave your comments below.

To add your free business coupon just search for your business on CitySquares and once you find it, click it so you go to your business profile page. On the right side of the page you’ll see a blue box to Edit your listing for free. You’ll then be taken to a page where you can edit your business information. Keep in mind that you do need to have a username and password on CitySquares to do this.

Lastly, we encourage you to enter a coupon or discount that is redeemable. For example, something that says “Free hair coloring for first time customers when you bring this coupon with you!” This way your asking the consumer to bring the coupon with them and you’ll be able to see for yourself that the coupons are working!

Take full advantage of this and spread the word!

Please email us at help@citysquares.com if you have any questions.

As CitySquares.com grows we need to make sure that the site continues to be easy to navigate and that all the people who use the site can find everything they’re looking for. One of the big additions to the site is a greatly improved navigation system that makes getting from one place to another much easier. We redesigned the header area at the top of the site so it would take up less space which in turn moves important content higher up the page. Now you can just change your location by typing in the city, town or zip code directly into the ‘change location’ text box as shown in the sample below.

Speaking of improvements, we created a cleaner and simpler home page that better articulates to our neighbors and merchant audiences just what CitySquares.com is about, and what you can do. On the new home page we added a really cool ‘What’s New’ scrolling ticker so users can see, in real time, what is happening on the site. The ticker shows the latest reviews, ratings, merchant profile edits and other activities on the site. We also added a more obvious call-to-action so small businesses can quickly jump into updating or upgrading their profile. There is also a list of top cities and a prominent location text field so users may jump to the location of their choice with ease. Visit the new home page here.

We think we’ve done a great job at providing valuable business content to users but we wanted to add more fun and engaging stuff too, so users could share their favorite businesses with friends and family as well. After figuring out what we wanted, and coincidentally meeting the folks over at AgendiZe, we entered into a partnership with them to bring you just the goods we envisioned! Agendize offers a plethora of viral tools for users such as sending a text message, add to Facebook and other bookmarks as well as instant messaging, saving to Outlook and so much more. You can see a sample of it here on this profile. Just click on on the of yellow buttons below the profile information and you will get a window of options. Every single profile on CitySquares.com has these tools so please start sharing your favorite businesses.

Lastly we added national events to the site which is just one of the early steps to truly become what we’ve long envisitione – to be your neighborhood online. The events are brought to you through our partnership with another great company called Eventful. You can find local, and hyperlocal, events all across the country on all the city, town, and neighborhood pages on CitySquares.com. Go here to see hyperlocal events in Wrigleyville Chicago!

Well, that’s quite a bit since our national roll out! And that’s not it either. Very soon we’ll be rolling out even more – including hyperlocal news, community information, classifieds, and some really fun tools to allow users to find everything they need about their location on CitySquares but more specifically, in their real world, their community.

Stay tuned for more updates and improvements to the site! We’re on a mission to provide the most hyperlocal content on the web – from business info, to real community info, events, news, classifieds, you name it. We aim to be Your Neighborhood, Online! Now the fun really starts.

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to leave some comments here! We’re always happy to chat and hear your thoughts.

With call tracking enabled on your business profile CitySquares can track the phone calls that come to you from CitySquares. We can also record your phone calls so you can improve the quality of services that you are providing your customers. The main goal is to convert these phone calls into sales!

Here’s a quick example of how it works:

If you have a CitySquares Deluxe or Premier Profile, we can assign you a local telephone number (in your area code and likely your exchange) to put on your profile page.

When a customer finds your profile on CitySquares and they call that phone number, we can track who called, what time, length of call, and provide those statistics back to you in a report.

CitySquares can also record your phone calls, should you choose, so you listen to the recordings and ensure that your gatekeepers are handling the calls correctly and maximizing the lead opportunity.

Furthermore, you can have more than one phone number for use in other marketing campaigns. So you can use a call tracking number in a direct mail campaign, or a newspaper ad campaign, and use this service to track the effectiveness of that campaign.

Pretty simple, but very cool!

If you’d like to know how call tracking can benefit your business, please call us at (888) 711-6885.

Atlanta Georgia on CitySquares

Last week I wrote about the first stage of our national expansion to Delaware and Maryland. Well, the road trip continues further down south. As the weather in New England stays frigid we figured we would take our show on the road and head past the Mason Dixon into Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.  Don’t worry Mountaineer faithful we didn’t skip West Virgina. We will be circling back.

The business count on the site is now around 5 million putting us almost a third of the way to our goal of 16 million. We will keep you posted on every step of our expansion so you know where we are going and when we will be there.  Up next we are heading to sunny Florida, home of Tim Tebow and the National Champion Gators, to finish off the East Coast. We then will jump out to the left coast and visit California, Oregon and Washington as well as a few others. So please head down to Atlanta, GA and check out AA Ok Bail Bonding, just kidding, but we did hear that Highland Tap is a great place for first dates and martinis.

– Bob

1) the small businesses along the streets, with their storefronts, their goods and services, their owners who employ the locals and teenagers during the summer, who take good care of their customers, the local residents. Who know the children, the selectman, and who keep their sidewalks clean.

2) the artists of the community who hold high aesthetic standards, who remind us of the beauty in our world, and even the darkness. The artists who have passions for certain causes, who stick together and surprise us, who open our eyes. The musicians who sit on the park bench strumming a guitar, or the painter who stands on the shoreline painting a landscape, and who all hang out at the local coffee shop talking about politics or collaborate on some new media projects.

3) the local non-profits and pioneers whose only mission is to give something back to the community, the country, the planet, and do good things, who work tirelessly and usually for barely a livable wage to ensure everyone has access to affordable housing, to health care, or who work improve the local economy, or help clean our planet for the next generations.

These three constituents in our society are the very core of our communities. They attract a certain population, they affect the local culture, they define the community. They attract people of all walks of life, of all races, of all belief systems and politics. They are the heartbeat of our communities. Without them, our communities have no identity or character.

For the last three years CitySquares has offered non-profits and local artists free profiles on CitySquares.com. Unfortunately we’ve never really publicized this, never really marketed it. That’s always been a bit of a thorn in our side too, something we’ve always intended to do but keep getting distracted from. So I’m hoping that this blog entry can serve as our first real foray into marketing this better. Let it be known now:

CitySquares provides all non-profit organizations, and all local artists with free Deluxe Profiles on CitySquares.com. There is no catch, there is no cost, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

If you are a non-profit or a local artist, then you are welcome to sign up for a Free Deluxe Profile! Here’s just a basic example. How the profile looks and functions largely depends the content you make available on it. You can get very creative with these profiles!

What are the benefits of having a Deluxe Profile on CitySquares.com?
Like all of our profiles, they’re extremely Search Engine Optimized. So when people use the search engines to find you they’re very likely to discover your profile on CitySquares.com. Also, we have over one million people each month using CitySquares.com, and that number is growing especially as we continue to roll-out the site nationally. If you have a website, use your CitySquares profile to link to it and improve your search engine rankings. Take advantage of some of the bells and whistles on these profiles like reviews, and ratings. Embed a YouTube video if you have one, or add some images showing your art work or photography. There’s much more.

How do you get started?
Add your non-profit or your Artist profile to CitySquares.com by clicking here. Then standby for a phone call or email from us and we’ll take care of the rest. It’s pretty easy. And don’t worry about the lingo on the page, or about pricing.  Just proceed with the free options and we’ll take care of the rest.

We hope you’ll take full advantage of this opportunity which has no expiration date. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or need a hand.

Happy Holidays,

– Ben Saren

Our last product update was a while ago, but that certainly doesn’t mean we haven’t been doing anything. Quite the contrary in fact, we’re so busy we often forget to go home! Our last update went over our Business Amenities feature, which has been very well received by our customers. Since then we’ve been pretty quiet on the blog, but we’ve kept ourselves busy behind the scenes with a few changes to the front-end of the website that you may have noticed browsing around, and lots of changes to the back-end to support our increasing traffic.

First, the front end; we’ve updated our product information page to give businesses a better idea of what we do and what we’re about. Along with that we’ve upgraded the process for adding your own business information. You’ll see a call-to-action to add your business in the top right of the product page, or check it out here. You do have to be logged in to add your business so if you don’t yet have an account at CitySquares.com now is a great time to get signed up. We were getting a lot of duplicate entries and we realized people needed an easy way to search for their business before they added it. So our new ‘add business’ form integrates a live search as you type – so if you’re already on our site your listing will appear and you can just edit the existing information!

Along with the new add business process we have added a new eCommerce system so you can find and purchase your business listing all online! Currently your only option is to upgrade to a deluxe listing, but we’re hoping to expand that to include other options in the future. I encourage you to sign up and see if your business is already listed for free and of course check out our awesome upgrade options!

You may also have noticed that our banner ads have changed slightly – you can see those throughout the site. We made the move to IAB standard size ads in early September along with our ad management system overhaul. We are now using Google AdManager to serve up all the ads you see across the site, which allows us to easily serve up Google AdSense in locations that we have unsold inventory or choose to display them. As of now we have set it up so our paying local advertisers will always trump AdSense in priority so we maintain our hyper-local focus. We have also worked in a pretty neat system where we’re able to provide banner advertising site-wide all the way down to a specific neighborhood and anywhere in between. You could even exclusively buy select neighborhoods if you chose to target your ads.

Otherwise we’ve been pretty quiet on the front end, but we’ve got some big changes coming soon. I can’t show you everything yet, but I can provide a couple sneak peeks.

Besides the usual bug fixes, that’s pretty much everything on the front end. On the back end, we have moved our infrastructure onto Amazon Web Services EC2/S3 using RightScale to manage our instances. Justin is blogging our experience over at his blog. I’d recommend going there to get more details on what we’ve done, there’s way too much information for just one post.

Outside of the infrastructure changes, we’ve been going through all of our database queries and optimizing as much as possible, tweaking and removing where necessary, and trying to get every bit of performance our of our current system as possible.

So we’ve been pretty busy as of late, with much more to come as we expand the site to new areas. Keep an eye out for changes and we’ll do our best to keep you updated here.

As always, we love to hear from you so, if you have any thoughts, please leave us a note in the comments!

– Michael

Chocolee Chocolates in South End, Boston is an adorable boutique chocolate shop that specializes in handmade chocolates and truffles.

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All Things Chocolate is located in the heart of Boston in the Back Bay.  This family run business offers a variety of chocolates and candies.  They do a beautiful job of creating delicious gifts for all occasions.

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I hope you were able to make it through both of these videos before having to run down the street for your chocolate fix!

We have many other videos that I cant wait to show you. Stay tuned!

– Kim

As of just a few days ago we now allow businesses to add even more detailed information about their establishments with a new feature called amenities. Businesses now have the ability to tell users even more about their business including such details as parking type, smoking/non-smoking, WiFi, kid friendly, take out, delivery, attire, price, and payment types accepted just to name a few. By allowing businesses to include this deeply specific information it helps users to find the important information they need about the business as well as allowing search engines to get more relevant content about a business and hence, help them rank higher too. We hope you enjoy this new information!

If you have any thoughts or feedback about new amenities you may like to see please feel free to email me. I am always here with an open ear!

-Bob

The snapshot is just one example of how amenities display on the site.