Posted by Charlie Thu, 30 Aug 2007 21:43:00 GMT
I imagine that most people realize that search engines use bots, or spiders, to continually crawl across the web looking for new content. But I bet most people don't realize how pervasive bots really are.
Analyzing the MapBuzz web logs, 64 different bots visited our site in the last few week. And here are the top ten:
You can see they come visit quite often.
Posted by Charlie Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:33:00 GMT
Besides working on new features and bugs, we spend a lot of time tweaking existing pages to make them simpler and easier to use. Of course, the most important page on most sites is the home page. Not only do you have to convey to first time visitors what your site is about, but you also have to make them interested enough to use it.
Feedback from users made it clear that our previous homepage had too much wasted space. We also discovered users liked the map that automatically zoomed to their current location, and liked the featured maps and communities on the bottom. Based on that feedback, we kept the map and made featured maps and communities more visible.
So when you get a chance take a look at tour new home page and let us know what you think!
Posted by Charlie Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:21:00 GMT
Two things made Google maps popular - its interactivity and its hackability. Users were delighted when they discovered you could simply hold down the mouse button and drag a map around. Today, any map that doesn't support that functionality seems "dead".
However, for power users, navigating around a Google map can quickly get tedious. The main problem is that you can't quickly zoom in or out of an area.
Well, we think we've solved that problem. On MapBuzz, if you hold the shift key down and then drag a map, you see a navigation box appear:
The way this works is by dragging to the:
Obviously this feature is only for power users, but once you discover it you'll see that it is a very fast, powerful way to navigate through a map.
Posted in Features | no commentsPosted by Charlie Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:29:00 GMT
Last night I attended an REI seminar about Ania Savage's book Best Hikes With Dogs: Colorado. It was a good crowd - roughly thirty people attended.
As part of the seminar, I gave a brief talk about MapBuzz and showed everyone how they can access each Dog hike online and add their own comments and ideas. People seem quite excited - I can't wait to hear everyone's comments about the hikes!
Posted by Charlie Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:25:00 GMT
Today's release included a slew of goodies.
First, we updated the icon browser, shown on the left, to make it easier to use. We also added a number of new icons, including icons for sports, country flags and outdoor activities.
Second, we updated the feature editors that are used on maps to make them easier to use. You can now change a feature's icon and its title in place, thereby eliminating several clicks.
Last, we significantly improved map rendering speed and community listing speed. But we'll save the details for another post.
Posted by Charlie Sun, 15 Jul 2007 20:26:00 GMT
Last week we spent a a day combing over MapBuzz's map rendering performance. With just a bit of work, we were able to improve it over 700 percent!
If you're interested in the details, I wrote a full post about it on my personal blog.
Posted by Charlie Tue, 10 Jul 2007 07:48:00 GMT
Last week we pushed an update that added icon categories. If you take a look at the screenshot below, you'll see a two default categories - City and Outdoor. The outdoor icons, which are part of our new icon library, are shown on the right.
Posted by Charlie Sun, 24 Jun 2007 05:39:00 GMT
Custom icons are here. Finally! For a while there it seemed we would never finish them.
So what's the big deal? Custom icons let you decide how a feature should be shown on a map. For example, say you are mapping your favorite bars in Denver.
Which of these icons would you prefer?
or
Now you get to decide. Of course, making nice looking icons is hard. So we'll be building a nice icon library in the coming weeks, so you can quickly choose nice looking icons for your map.
Posted by Charlie Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:19:00 GMT
Yesterday Apple released a beta version of Safari 3 for both Mac OS X and Windows.
We've wanted to support Safari for a long time, but haven't due to its lack of SVG support and rich text editing. Safari 3 fixes those issues - so we went straight to work getting MapBuzz to run.
Unfortunately, we've had mixed success so far. On the positive side, the site renders beautifully and rich text editing seems to work well enough.
On the downside, the SVG support seems buggy. In particular, Safari does not correctly recognize mouseover events on features on the map when the map is offset from the top left corner of the page. In addition, as you drag a map around, Safari seems to "lose" feature - they flash in and out of existence.
For the short term, we'll update MapBuzz within the next week to provide read-only access to Safari. At the same time, we'll see if we can come up with any workarounds for the issues we've encountered and submit the apppropriate bug reports to Apple.
As for older versions of Safari, we are considering releasing a modified version of MapBuzz that lets you view/edit points but not lines or features. Does that sound like a reasonable thing to do?
Posted by Charlie Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:49:00 GMT
Over the weekend, we released the latest installment of MapBuzz, code named El Chichon.
We started work on El Chichon in early May, and by the time we finished last week had implemented 212 enhancements and bug fixes. Of particular note:
Enjoy!
