Rapid Web News

“The Nudge lets you exchange and manage brief reviews with people you know on everything that’s happening in your City, and beyond.

Let your starting point in choosing anything (from a hotel in San Francisco or a restaurant in London, to a new book or a concert in New York) be the reviews of people you know, whose opinion you trust.

The Nudge is also launching weekly City Editions for London and New York. These can be accessed through the site or subscribed to via email and will combine our favourite member recommendations with some insider knowledge of what’s new and happening in your City each week.

The Nudge will launch over the summer of 2010. If you’d like to be involved as one of the first to have access to the beta version of the site, please let us know by subscribing below.”

Rapid Web is proud to be working with The Nudge, to create a new social networking abstraction, which focuses on the recommendation of consumer products and services, dependant upon a well defined and focused network of local social knowledge.

The Nudge teaser site is now live and contains a custom made web design, a themed blog system and other dynamic contact, such as a form to allow users to sign up for the up and coming beta.

If you are interested in what The Nudge will have to offer in the future, take a look at the new blog post on The Nudge Blog, ‘Why Subscribe to Join the Nudge?‘.

To apply for The Nudge beta, just head to thenudge.com and fill in the ‘Apply for the beta’ form.

WordPress, the super popular open-source content management and blogging software has recently gone into beta. Version 3 of WordPress looks to bring many new features to the system including a revamped administration system and the ability to deploy a network of WordPress powered blogs simultaneously on the same domain in either seperate directories or subdomains.

WordPress 3.0 Beta 1 also comes with a new default blog them called Twenty Ten which comes with custom background and header options built-in.

The official WordPress development blog gives the following information about what to expect in WordPress 3.0.

You Should Know:

• The custom menus system (Appearance > Menus) is not quite finished. In Beta 2, the layout will be different and a bunch of the functionality will be improved, but we didn’t want to hold things up for this one screen. You can play with making custom menus, and report bugs if you find them, but this is not how the final screen will look/work, so don’t get attached to it.
• The merge! Yes, WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.
• We’re still fiddling with a few small things in the UI, as we were focused on getting the more function-oriented code finished first. For example, we’re getting a new icon for the Super Admin section.

Things to test:

• Play with the new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.
• Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up. It’s really easy to add new types, so do that and see how it looks!
• WordPress MU users should test the multiple sites functionality to make sure nothing broke during the merge.

I previously posted about Google’s new web design, and now the BBC website is undergoing a beta web design. Take a look at the new BBC web design in the screenshot below.

Click the image above to view an enlarged screenshot. Alternatively, you can take a look at the beta BBC directly at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/

The new BBC homepage design is even heavier in JavaScript and AJAX functionality allowing for some extremely dynamic customisation of the page to any individual user’s personal preferences.