God bless Unchained and all who sail in her

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am proud to present Unchained - your destination for the very best independent shops in London.

We have now launched our beta version of the site for people to play with, look for things that bug them and give their feedback. And we'd love you to be amongst the first people to use it.

There are still a few little bugs that we're trying to fix. And there's only about 90 shops on the site at the moment - there'll be loads more added at the start of January. But the main workings are all there. Here's what to look out for:

• The shopping trip - You can save any of the shops to a temporary list by clicking on the 'shopping trip' button. This creates a floating panel that shows you all the shops you've selected. You can view them on a map and print them out to take with you on your retail extravaganza. The panel appears initially at the top of the page. It's an orange bar that you can expand and minimise and drag around the screen. You can even share your shopping trip with your friends so that they can join you on your adventure.

• My favourites - You'll also see a little yellow star that lets you add a shop to a more permanent favourites list. You can see this list by clicking on the 'my account' link at the top of the screen and then clicking on the 'go to my favourites' for your chosen city.

• Searching - There are a few ways to find what you're looking for. You can simply click on shop types in the left hand listing. Or - best of all - use the search box at the top left to find shops by name, products, type, area or character.

Please try it out and tell us what you think. And start shopping Unchained.

Another little sneaky peak

Here's another little look at some of the functionality of the soon-to-be-released Unchained site.

Each shop listing comes with a Google map showing exactly where they are. Just look at the cute little Unchained flag!

We're also giving you the ability to plan a shopping trip round a number of shops and plot them all on a map.

We're testing it all out at the moment and it's working beautifully. We just can't wait to release it into the wild. Which is something we will be doing very soon.

And we do mean VERY soon!

Follow the blog by phone

Seeing as a big part of Unchained will be the mobile site, we decided to make the blog mobile as well. So now you can follow us from wherever you are on your mobile phone.

If you're sufficiently teched up, you can visit the site by taking a picture of the QR code at the top of this post. If not, get your text thumb working and type the following address into your phone's browser:

http://winksite.com/davebirss/unchained