Lost Laowai Gets All Two Point Oh’d

As I mentioned the other day, or was it the other week? Anyway, as I mentioned, Lost Laowai has been/is going through a rather extensive redesign and upgrade.

There were a lot of reasons I wanted to scrap the old design, not the least of which being that much of the design wasn’t deliberate – but rather put together piecemeal as I had the time. Additionally, it didn’t offer much in the way of fluidity between the site’s two major landing points – this blog and the main Lost Laowai site.

I have largely corrected this in the new design and plan to further bang out the corners in the coming days.

And as this is Lost Laowai v2.0, it seems fitting that we offer a whole lot more interconnectivity to various popular Web 2.0 applications. So, on top of this handsome design there’s just a crapload more for you all to get wrapped up in.

New Features

The coolest new feature has got to be the Laowai Media area. This area makes it easy for you to share all sorts of China-related media.

• The Lost Laowai flickr Group: Now, you can simply join our flickr group, throw your cool China photos in the pool and they’ll be displayed on the Lost Laowai site for all to see.
• YouTube Videos: You can have your videos displayed on our media page and in our sidebar’s media section by simply tagging them with “lostlaowai“.
• Del.icio.us Music and Podcasts: Found a great Chinese MP3 you want to share? An informative or funny podcast? Simply save them to your del.icio.us social bookmarking account as you normally would, and tag them with “llwmusic” and “llwpod” respectively. Simple as, eh?

Features Redux

I’ve also improved a lot of our previous features, including:

• The Lost Laowai Forum: I scraped the old boards, and these (at least in my opinion) look a lot better. They’re fresh as can be though, so please lend a hand and go throw some posts in them. Got a question? Some comments? A cool tip? Or just want to start some controversy? The forum is the place for it.
• China Jobs Board: Whether you’re looking for a new job or a new employee – check out our free job posting listing a number of jobs specifically for foreigners interested in working in China.
• Laowai Classifieds: Buy – Sell – Trade. The free classifieds are open for business. Post book exchanges, sell your iPod, buy an apartment – it’s capitalism at its finest.
• The LICtionary: The Life In China Dictionary, or LICtionary, is a place to browse and post words and phrases that have been created just for us laowai. Coined yourself the perfect phrase that describes life in China? Submit it here and claim it as yours.
• Content: We’re adding more and more every day. We’ve a wide range of topics we’re looking to cover, language, travel, expat life – you name it. Be sure to check back often, or sign up to the various RSS feeds to stay current.

Providing a pleasant place for laowai to play…

The community aspects have also been beefed up, and will continue to be added to over the next week or so. User profiles now feature all sorts of fields for you to share your information (incl. your Web sites and social sites – flickr, facebook, etc.). You can private message other laowai, leave scribblings on their “wall”, and a number of other features that escape my rather tired mind at the moment.

Additionally, we’ve got the Lost Laowai Chat up and running, so go check it out and see if there are any other laowai to talk to. If not, you can always chat up our AI kitty – Chairman Meow. He’s reasonably bright, but – and this is just cool – you can teach him new phrases (just type /? in the chat screen to find out how.

A lot of these features require registration – I know, I know… one more thing you have to sign up for… but honestly – it’s worth it! And it’s free. Ok, so most crap on the Internet is free, and that’s not much of a selling point – but Lost Laowai needs no selling point! It’s radtastic. Zhou Enlai told me so.

So enough hype and holla – go check it all out, then come back here and let me know what you think. If you find any major bugs, fire me off an . I look forward to seeing your feedback. Enjoy.