Tomorrow morning between 6am and 9am eastern time TVFoodMaps.com will be taken down and replaced by a brand new TVFoodMaps.com. The new site will provide a much better and easier to use user experience. It will make finding and researching the restaurants seen on TV simpler, faster and hopefully more fun for you.  So if you have an “TVFoodMapping” to do please get it done by 6am tomorrow morning or wait for the new site.

We are very excited to announce that in just a few weeks we will be launching a totally new version of our website, www.tvfoodmaps.com.  Our original site launched in 2010 and has served the Food TV loving community well, but now with over 3000 restaurants and 30 shows we decided a nice facelift was in order.  The new site will look better, be faster and be easier to use and give us a strong foundation to add new shows and features over the coming months.  This new site has taken a lot of work to put together.  As we get ready to launch the site in early March we are looking for any of our fans/followers who can help us promote the launch.  Whether it’s you personally or a connection you have that can help us spread the word, get blog coverage or put us on the cover of Food Network magazine (we can dream can’t we).  If you are interested in being part of helping make our re-launch a success please contact us @ tvfoodmaps[at]gmail.com

Happy New Years Everyone!

Over the past few weeks we’ve done a few important things.  First, we cleaned up a lot of our existing data.  This means getting rid of duplicate restaurants, mistaken addresses / phone numbers and adding missing information like cuisine and cost to MANY of our listings.  We also added 4, yes, 4, new shows.  We’ve added Burger Land, United States of Bacon, Sandra Lee’s Taverns, Lounges & Clubs and Eden Eats.  So whether you are looking for greasy bacon, a cocktail or some international cuisine we’ve got you covered.  This was a lot of work but we hope it was well worth it.

That is all nothing compared to what we have in store for 2013.  Our next big update will likely be a redesign of our website.  A totally new look and hopefully better and faster experience for you!  We also will make some updates to our mobile app but that will likely wait until after the website update.  Please be sure to watch our Facebook and Twitter feeds for more information about our updates.  As always we’d love to know what features are of most interest to you so we can adjust our plans accordingly.

We hope you and your family have gotten off to a great 2013 and we hope to continue running TVFoodMaps.com so that you can enjoy all the great food this country has to offer!

Well 2012 is almost over. We’ve been working on a couple of new things in the past few weeks and wanted to keep you all up to date.  First, you may have seen that we released our TVFoodMaps Challenge Facebook app. The app lets you see where you rank in terms of visiting the most popular Food TV destinations.  You can challenge a friend and help us go viral!  We really appreciate it.

We also just added 2 news shows to the site.  The first is Burger Land which is a Travel Channel series that was piloted this year and will be picked up next year.  We figured we’d add it now as it showcased some great burger spots in the first two episodes.  The other show is Anthony Bourdain’s Layover.  The show features both U.S. and International destinations however our site is only ready to handle U.S. spots for now.  One of our top goals in 2013 is to go GLOBAL!

We are just started an effort to try to clean up some existing data where we have wrong or outdated information.  We are also looking to add more content for each restaurant.  Hopefully these changes will be available very soon.

We’ve got a lot planned for 2013!  As always we appreciate your feedback and your help spreading the word about the site.  The less time we spend marketing the more time we have to improve the site and mobile apps!

Thanks again and Happy Holidays!

Sometimes a little competition is fun.  So we’ve created a Facebook app that easily allows you to see how many of the 50 most popular restaurants on TVFoodMaps you’ve been to and challenge your friends to see who is the ultimate TV Foodie.  We’ve kept it nice and simple you dont even need a TVFoodMaps account.

You can get started by clicking this link.

Then just click the checkbox next to the places you’ve been and click submit.

On the results page you will see you’re rank worldwide and amongst your friends.  Then you can click “Challenge Friends” and challenge your friends to see how many places they have been to!  As always we appreciate your help in spreading the word and are always open to feedback.

As we announced in a previous post, we’ve changed how we share your TVFoodMap actions with Facebook.  Those changes automatically share your actions with Facebook.  However, perhaps you want to share (brag) about the places you’ve been to all at once?  Well we’ve got you covered there as well.

Now you can share the # of places on your “Try” or “Been” list.  It’s real simple.  Once you are logged in click the My Account link on the top of the page.  From there you will see the following:

Note: for simplicity the Liked and Disliked buttons both share your combined “Been List”

From here it’s simple, click the share button and fill in the Facebook dialog.  Your post will be sent and will contain a link directly to your TVFoodMaps list/map.

Again – we really appreciate when you share with friends, it helps us get the word out and continue o grow TVFoodMaps.

In an effort to better server our users and also help improve how we spread the word about TVFoodMaps.com we’ve changed how we share information on Facebook.  When you enable us to share your actions you help us spread the word about TVFoodMaps in an informative and unobtrusive way.

In the past when you connected via Facebook we requested access to post on your behalf and access your check-ins for our location notification feature. Now, we have changed that. We no longer post directly to your wall but rather add “actions” via the Facebook Open Graph. This allows Facebook to determine if something belongs on your wall, newsfeed, etc based on relevance. It also means we can’t post something else without your permission.  We also separated out the check-in access so if you want to share your actions but not your location you can control that.

How to Enable Facebook Sharing

Instead of logging in with a regular username and password click the Facebook login button.  If you’ve already registered, don’t worry, we’ll link your old account with your Facebook login and everything will be seamless.

Once you are logged in via Facebook just browse TVFoodMaps as you normally would – as you add places to your like, dislike and try list using the buttons below we will automatically post the actions to Facebook.

How they show up on Facebook is controlled by Facebook.  They may show up in your timeline, newsfeed or activity feed.  Here is an example of how it showed up on my timeline page:

Another cool thing is that over time Facebook will aggregate your activity and your friends will be able to see all the places you’ve been via your Timeline apps.  One note, we haven’t enabled adding actions you already made to Facebook – if you are interested in that let us know (either email or comment on our Facebook page).

Again, enabling this type of sharing really helps us out and we greatly appreciate it!

One of our more popular features is our road trip planner which allows you to put in your starting location and destination and find restaurants on TV along the route. We’ve always had the ability for you to specify how far off the route you are willing to go but we’ve just added a new feature. The new feature allows you to specify how many miles after the beginning of the trip and before the end of the trip you wish to exclude. Why? A lot of times you dont want to stop at the very beginning of a trip or near the end. Also, for many of us that live near major cities the results get filled up with local results.

For example here is a search driving from Long Island, NY to Cambridge, MA without the new feature. As you can see over 100 results mostly in the NYC and Boston areas.

If we set the exclude value to 25 miles we now get a much smaller result list and results that are much more useful.

As with many features on the site we built this b/c we found it useful and hope you will as well.

Give the TVFoodMaps Road Trip Planner a try.

We’re please to announce that we have added Food Networks 24 in 24 to TVFoodMaps.com. The show features Food Network star winner Jeff Mauro traveling the country looking to eat 3 meals in 24 hours for only $24.  Take that Rachael Ray and your fancy $40 a day.    I’m a big fan of Jeff Mauro and so far find the show pretty entertaining.  So for those of you on a budget this may be just the show for you.

We are excited to announce the launch of our new Forums on TVFoodMaps.  Thanks to the thousands of users who visit our site and post very helpful reviews and suggestions for both the places and shows we feature,  we have decided to create a more centralized Forum on TVFoodMaps.

The Forum page has three key categories

1. Places
2. Shows
3. Locations

Registered users now have the ability to post a question in a specific location asking for advice, provide feedback/suggestions for a given show, or provide a review for a place. Also you can subscribe to a specific thread so you are notified when someone replies back.

To post a new thread to the forums you just need to click on the Post New Thread button on the Forum Homepage

Posting a thread is simple you can either select a place, show, or location and then just enter in your post.

What makes our forums unique is let’s say you comment on a place which is in NY and on Diner Drive in and Dives, well then your post will not only show up on the place you commented on but also automatically feed into the DDD show chat as well as the NY location chat.

As always we love hearing from our users so please contact us from our “About Us” page with any feedback!

PS:  Don’t worry, we have converted all of the original posts (over 2,000) into the forum.