EVH Feature Drop: August 2026

EVH is one this month - can you believe it! What started out as a small thing to keep me busy after surgery on my foot has become a full website that (hopefully!) has something that’s useful for everyone who lives in East Village.

To celebrate, I’ve dropped a heap of new features and updates to the website - here’s a quick look at what’s new…

Should I open my windows?

We’ve had… I’ve lost count of how many heatwaves we’ve had now this year, but it’s hot - and our flats are well insulated. Great for winter, but not so great in the summer when it’s stifiling (thoughts and prayers to south facing flats!)

I’ve built a tool that suggests when you might want to close your windows to keep the cool in, and fling them open to get the heat out!

It reads the Met Office forecast and DEFRA air quality every hour and gives you one call - open or closed - plus the reason it's saying so. Whichever factor fails first gets named: outside temperature against a 22°C indoor assumption, rain, air quality, or wind. During hot spells it switches to night-purge guidance, because opening wide overnight shifts far more heat than opening at midday.

There's a 24-hour outlook grouped into runs, so you can plan around "closed until 9pm" rather than squinting at 24 separate bars. The current verdict also shows on the home screen and on the Apps tile.

Notifications, rebuilt

Notifications used to mean email or push, and not much control over either. Now there are three channels and a proper grid.

• An on-site inbox. Everything that happens lands in one place, with an unread badge on the bell in the header. No email needed, no device needed.
• One preference matrix. Every topic against every channel - on-site, push, email - so you can have safety alerts push to your phone and everything else sit quietly in the inbox.
• Quiet hours. Set a window and push and email hold off until it's over.

Safety alerts stay free for everyone on-site and on push. They are not, and won't be, a supporter perk. Email delivery and the weekly digest are - sending email costs real money per message, so that's the line we drew.

The Hub now knows what you follow

Three things used to disagree about what "following" a topic meant. They've been merged into one.

Your Your East Village row on the home screen is now built from the topics you actually picked, and each chip takes you into the topic - heating goes to the heating tracker, parking goes to Sippi, construction goes to local developments. Not the generic news list.

Those chips now carry a dot when there's something new, and the dot clears when you've looked. When we publish a news or construction story in a topic you follow, you get it - in the inbox always, on push and email only if you asked for it.

Haven't picked your topics yet? There's a one-tap prompt to do it.

News that’s easier to navigate

The news categories were doing too little work. There are now proper categories - housing, safety, transport, development, politics, environment, community, events - applied across every existing article and link.

On the news index you can filter to one category, and the filter lives in the URL, so a filtered view is a link you can send someone. Articles themselves got a redesign: a reading-progress indicator, related stories at the end, month grouping in the list, and polls where a story warrants one.

Ask EVH is easier to reach, and remembers the conversation

Ask is now the first thing under the greeting on the home screen - a tap-through prompt bar with example questions that carry straight through to a full answer.

On the Ask page itself, follow-up questions now keep the thread, so you can dig into an answer instead of starting over. Your recent questions are kept on your own device, you can share an answer as a link, and there's a thumbs up/down on every answer that we actually read.

Worth knowing: every question you ask costs a few pence to answer. Not much on its own. It adds up.

Living here, rebuilt

The Living Here section had grown into a deep, hard-to-navigate tree. It's now flat and grouped: every page sits at /living-here/{name}, arranged by the question you're holding rather than by our filing system. Old links still work.

Up top there's a Right now in East Village strip - live status across the trackers in one glance. Explore has had the same treatment: three named groups instead of ten identical tiles, with live counts that are actually live.

Report anything that shouldn't be here

Every comment now carries a Report control. It takes a few seconds, works whether or not you're signed in, and everything reported goes to a moderation queue that a human works through.

We've also published clear posting guidelines - what's not allowed, how reports are handled, how takedowns work, and how to appeal one. This is EVH meeting its Online Safety Act duties, and it's the same plumbing every future community feature will inherit.

And the whole thing looks different

Every screen has been rebuilt on one design system - consistent typography, spacing, colour and layout, on mobile and desktop. Alongside that:

• Your account accent colour now carries through the entire site, not just My E20.
• Saving something gives you an undo, and the site remembers when it's the first thing you've ever saved.
• Trackers count up rather than snapping into place, and submitting a report gets you a small thank-you moment - you did add to the picture.
• Shared links now generate a proper preview card, so a story sent to a WhatsApp group looks like something.
• Granular cookie controls - analytics and session recording are now separate choices - plus a new accessibility statement.
• All of it respects "reduce motion" if that's set on your device.

One honest paragraph about money

East Village Hub is one person. Me. I write it, build it, moderate it and pay for it - the servers, the weather data, the email, the maps, the domain, the AI that answers your questions. There's no company behind it and nothing here is sponsored, which is exactly why it can say what it says about the estate.

If July was useful to you, the smallest tier is £2 a month and genuinely helps. £5 comes with the weekly digest, email alerts and a few other conveniences. If monthly isn't your thing, a one-off fiver works just as well and needs no account.

And if money's tight - fair enough, honestly. Use everything, report what's broken, tell a neighbour it exists. That helps too.

There’s more to come - including a new roadworks tool, but more on that when it lands in the next few weeks.

Thanks for your support.

Andy.