adventures of superdyke behind the scenes of the online community - www.superdyke.com

It’s Toronto Pride this weekend and I’ve been working to add a few new features to the site. If you’re in the city, you can view all the Toronto Pride listings for queer chicks here. Also added in time for pride is a community directory of local Toronto gay-friendly businesses and community organizations — Toronto Community Directory. I’d like to create a similar directory for Vancouver and Halifax, so if you live in either of those cities and want to help out, get in touch with me!

The past few months have seen superdyke involved in sponsoring various Toronto and Vancouver community events/organizations. Check ‘em out:

Toronto:
Notso Amazon Softball League - Superdyke Umpire Squad for the 2009 season
Inside/Out - Toronto’s queer film festival: Dyke Delights - May 18, 2009
Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Gym - community sponsor for a fight night

Vancouver:
OutOnScreen - Sponsoring two flicks for 2009’s festival season
Canadian Mayhem - May 8 - 10, 2009

If you would like Superdyke to consider sponsoring your event or organization, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can figure out!

Brand spankin’ new: check out superdyke’s event listings on your smartphone, Blackberry, or iPhone at http://m.superdyke.com

Some minor updates to SD this week include:

• Added a ‘replied’ icon that displays if you’ve responded to a message - this will only be in effect for messages sent going forward from this morning and does not apply to messages sent in the past
• Worked out some slowness issues within the messaging system, but you may not notice overall
• If you receive a message sent to you via a group, it’ll show up in your message inbox flagged as being part of the group within the subject line
• Personalized some options when reading messages to make more user-friendly

Next on my list for this week (hopefully):

I want to take a look at the blocking a user process to make more user-friendly, and after that, I want to make the whole Groups system on SD better overall.

As usual I’ll take any other feature requests - thanks to aggrocultural for the replied icon suggestion.

Things have been a little slow lately with superdyke upgrades, but this one is a big one: the superdyke homepage has undergone a major update/redesign.  It’s cleaner, more organized, and just easier on the eyes. I don’t really plan on changing much of the main site design itself, so don’t worry if you like things the way they are once you’re logged in.

I’m in the process of moving houses, but once things are settled I plan on tackling some of inner parts of the site that are confusing or not so user-friendly, and hopefully bring some much needed organization to the site.

I hope you enjoy the homepage!

Hope everyone is surviving the weather! I know Vancouver has had a bit of the cold lately, and we got dumped on in blizzard proportions here in Toronto yesterday.

Few new developments on the SD front:

• modified the Friends List so it now includes a photo of your friend and is easier to read/view
• had a bunch of SD postcards printed up for promotional purposes - if you want any, drop me a line on sd (I’m skippy) with your mailing address and I’ll send you a few
• a couple friends of mine are dressing up as superdykes tonight and we’ll be at cherrybomb, doing some preliminary promoting for SD Toronto — the plan is to promote the hell out of SD in January so we’re testing out costumes and tactics!

Hope everyone keeps warm! I’m off (from the regular job) over the holidays so hoping to catch up on some SD work. Again, if there’s something you’d like to see change on the site, drop me a line or a comment here and I’ll work on it.

Update: Crap, just realized that the links to individual posts on here weren’t working properly. Fixed now, sorry about that!

Some updates for you:

• Completed a lot of work on the staff/admin area of the site where events are updated - you guys won’t notice this, though, sorry!
• More Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques - title changes, meta desc’s and keywords, etc.
• Added the ability to browse for gay-friendly businesses and venues: This is only relevant if an event has been entered and ‘attached’ to a venue, though. Check out a Toronto event at Slack’s for an example.

What do you want to see on superdyke? Are there areas of the site you wish were improved somehow? What do you want to be able to do? How do you want to interact with the site, or other users? Drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

Just a few things I’ve been working on over the past two weeks for SD:

• date of last login for users on your friends list
• easier to find listing of all the events we’ve got across Canada
• brought the advice column out of hibernation - ask a question!
• random bits of search engine optimization - this is the big time consumer
• better user-friendly wording on the account sign-up pages

So the awesome lesbian theatre group based out of Vancouver, the Leaping Thespians, have created a 2009 Dyke Vancouver calendar. It’s a fundraiser for their group and features local Vancouver queer women… including yours truly for the month of October. It’s an awesome idea - support the community and purchase a calendar.