We’ve been doing some tinkering under the hood here at DCist headquarters, and we’re excited to announce some site improvements.

First, we’ve added an events listing to the main page called the “Public Calendar”. It is located in the right hand column beneath the recent comments section. The events are drawn from the Washington, D.C. metro on the community events sharing website Upcoming.org. Upcoming allows users to upload information about events they are attending, post comments on them, and find people with similar interests. To post an event to our calendar add it to their listing, and it will be displayed here automatically.

Second, we’ve launched DCist Photos. This page displays recent photos taken by members of the DCist community. If you would like to submit a photo just email it to fact18working at photos.flickr.com. Enter the photo’s title as the subject line and your name and a description as the body text of the email. Store the address in your camera phone and send us photos on the go! If you are a user of the free photo-sharing service Flickr, it’s even easier to share your photos – just add the tag “DCist” to anything you’d like to share and it will appear on the photos page. After announcing the feature to the Flickr community some of the users there have contributed some interesting photos: Matt Billings has posted the photo seen above of Phoenix’s concert at the 9:30 Club (see our concert review), someone uploaded a stencil-covered car, and a “lost” poster for a doll named “Lupita.”