HocoBlogs.com

We have moved our Howard County blogs directory to hocoblogs.com, a collaborative effort with Jessie Newburn who initially gave us the idea to build a blogs directory on ezColumbia.

In the past few months we have watched our small blogging community grow from a handful of blogs to almost 70 blogs. Maybe we'll reach our goal of 100 blogs by the end of the year! We quickly knew it deserved to be on a site that was focused solely on blogs and local news and we're very excited to bring together all the different blogs Howard County has to offer.

If you like your news local and personal, stop by often.

October Update

Almost into November, so here's the October update. We've been working on getting the Services section easier to navigate, so we tried a few designs and settled on the current design. We may continue fine-tuning it as we added a few categories from various requests, so it's always a balancing act to maintain usability as the content grows. Please send us suggestions if you have cool ideas on usability.

The blogs page continues growing. In the past 45 days, we added 9 blogs to the directory. We now have 35 blogs in Howard County represented in our directory. Many have told us that they visit this page every day and some have even made the blogs page their home page. I personally love going to this page and the wide ranging topics and issues being discussed has led me to discover news stories that I would have missed otherwise. The most recent addition is a blog titled "Grounded and Rooted in Love" a blog sponsored by the Kittimaqundi Community Church. This was our second blog to touch on the topic of faith, so we decided to create a blog category for faith blogs. We look forward to seeing blogs from other faith communities in the future.

Aug/Sept update

We've been busy improving the user interface and listening to your suggestions. We added some key features last month that users have been requesting.

Restrict Coupon Printouts - you can now restrict the number of times a user (with the same email address) can print your coupon. The configuration options allow you to restrict it within a given time frame, so you can allow a user to print your coupon up to 2 times within 30 days, or 1 time within 15 days, or whatever frequency and time period combination you prefer.

Search - We now have search functionality across the site. You can now see the search box on the Restaurants and Services section. You'll see it soon on all the other main sections.

Expanded blogs & news section

We've expanded the blogs section to accomodate other types of blogs. We now have sections for Community, Family, Biz, Politics, Tech, and Others. And now you'll see a listing of the most recent postings including a brief summary of the posting. If you know of other bloggers in the area, please let us know and we'll include them in our list. The navigation has also been changed to make it easy to jump from one type of blog to another type. We're using this same look and feel in the news section as well. Unfortunately only the Baltimore Sun Howard County section and Howard County Gov news site has RSS feeds so we don't have summary pages for the other News Links. It would be great to get RSS feeds for the Columbia Flier ...

Please continue sending us your suggestions ... we really appreciate all the feedback we've been getting.

Online coupons launched

We recently launched the online coupons section and have gotten really good feedback. We're very hopeful that more local businesses and restaurants will start putting up their coupons online. The interface is very easy to use. In fact, anyone can use it, and since we're charging on a pay-per-print model, everyone can afford it. This is much cheaper than paying to distribute your coupons through print outlets that charge you based on printed circulation.

See a demo of the ezColumbia coupons system (you can literally create a coupon in less than a minute).

Healthcare, Automobile Services and other upcoming updates

We recently got requests for a category for Acupuncture and Auto Detailing, so we put up 2 new Local Services groups this week --- Healthcare and Automobile Services. We're thinking of putting up an *other* category in each group so that businesses that don't fit in an existing category can still submit their listing.

As the number of groups and categories grow, we will be redesigning the Local Services page to make it less cluttered. We have a few ideas and we'll be building some prototypes in the next few weeks to see which one would work best. We do have a search engine in place but we're still fine tuning the interface. That should be accessible soon.

Computer & Tech Services, Healthcare Services (coming soon)

We're fulfilling some requests made to add new sections to our Local Services directory.

We recently added a section for Computer & Tech Services.

And coming soon we're adding a section for Healthcare Services. So if you have a favorite pediatrician, please don't keep it a secret.