Posted by Anders
Thu, 15 May 2008 19:47:00 GMT
We've had icons for a while, allowing you to upload images to decorate maps, features, and your account. Due to popular demand, we've now added the ability to add photos images to features and maps.
The maximum pictures size is now 640x640. Unlike the smaller image sizes, this large size isn't cropped to be a square. Thus, nothing will be cut out of the image.
Here is what the "Feature Photos" looks like in the feature viewer:
Next up is a photo browser, that lets you see browse through photos using their larger size.
Posted in Social Mapping, Development, Infrastructure | Tags development, feature, icon, image, photo, picture | no comments
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 in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 21 Nov 2006 02:50:00 GMT
If you're not careful, IT work can quickly eat away weeks of time, throwing the best laid plans into disarray. The are few ways to combat it - 1) hire more people 2) outsource 3) automate everything. Choice #1 is certainly a great choice, but it loses appeal at small startups like MapBuzz where every resource is precious. Choice #2 suffers the same fate, leading to choice #3.
Everything should be automated. Builds should be automated. Testing should be automated. Deployment should be automated. Backups should be automated. Monitoring should be automated. And on and on.
Of course all this automation takes a fair amount of time. Someone has to sit down and put in the weeks of work to get everything working correctly. And the work never goes away - there are always minor tweaks to be made, bugs to fix, etc. And when your infrastructure radically changes, then its back to working full-time to make sure everything works as it should.
The last few weeks have been one of those times. We've made signficant improvements to our infrastructure, requiring a large update of our internal systems. In addition, we decided to automate some additional processes that were starting to take too much of our time. So althought if feels like time wasted on one hand, on the other hand it will free up significantly more time in the future to focus on launching MapBuzz.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Mon, 14 Aug 2006 04:55:00 GMT
Over the weekend we made some major changes to the MapBuzz database. The changes were designed to simplify the code that internally handles users and communities. For the most part these changes should be transparent to you. The only exception is that discussions and ratings were deleted (if this causes you problems let us know and we can fish out the deleted data from our backups).
You'll also notice that we've put in new titles on each page with rounded corners and gradients - both of which are bit tricky to do in HTML pages. Some of the pages are a bit guady, we're still working to get to the right color scheme.
This week we plan on rolling out a new header (the top part of each page), a new friends list page, home page, my mapbuzz page and map page.
For next week, we plan on updating search to significantly speed up its performance. We'll also improve map editing based on user enhancement requests, including automatic panning and a new polygon tool.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Tue, 01 Aug 2006 20:20:00 GMT
We just rolled out another update to the server that includes an improved user interface for the comments and map editor pages.
As part of the update, we also made some significant changes to the way comments are implemented. As a result, we had to delete all the existing comments. Sorry if this causes any problems.
Next up on the todo list is improving the search page, adding a home page and adding full text search of comments.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Sun, 09 Jul 2006 07:34:00 GMT
Most people don't realize that over 70% of all web sites are hosted by the Apache web server program. Apache was born at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. It grew through hundreds of patches contributed by users to the original code base. Thus, it was one of the first successful open source projects and laid the ground work for many projects to come. Today the Apache Foundation has grown into the premier incubator for open source projects as you can quickly tell by perusing its web site.
Having said all that, it turns out that many of the newer web application frameworks such as Rails don't run very well on Apache. Traditionally, each request to a web site starts a new program that performs the request. However, newer frameworks tend to use dynamic languages which means they have slow startup times. On the web that is untenable.
The usual workaround is to start a number of applications to serve requests ahead of time and leave them running. Each request is then sent to one of the application depending on how busy they are. This is often done using a technology called fast cgi. Since Apache doesn't have good fast cgi support, it tends not to be used for web sites that use Ruby on Rails or other similar frameworks.
It turns out though that fast cgi isn't a very good technology. It tends to be unreliable and hard to manage. Over the years, each web development community (the java community, the python community, now the rails community) comes to this realization and looks for a different approach. History has shown the best one is to embed a mini web server into each application. That way the main web server (like Apache) can simply act as a load balancer and forward requests to idle applications using standard web protocols (i.e., HTTP).
However, until the last few months you couldn't easily do this for Ruby on Rails. Thus MapBuzz has been using an alternative web server called lighttpd. Lighttpd is fast and has good fast cgi support, but lacks some of the features provided by Apache. This has resulted in some surprising bugs that we don't see in development (where we use yet another web server) and that we have to workaround.
In the couple of months though, Apache has surpisingly reemerged as good web server for MapBuzz. Two key things happened. First, Apache 2.2 released this spring added a new load balancer that is quite good. And second, a new project called Mongrel makes it easy to add a fast mini-web server to a Ruby application.
Thus we spent a day this weekend changing MapBuzz's infrastructure to use Apache, fixing a number of issues in the process. The new setup will be easier to manage, and should provide equivalent performance.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:43:00 GMT
One of the things on our todo list for the last couple of months is implementing automated client testing. Client testing is used to test the code that runs in your browser. There are so many combinations of browsers and operating systems that without automated testing it becomes very difficult to ensure a high quality release.
Over the last week we have integrated the selenium test framework into our testing framework. Selenium is an open source project that originated from ThoughtWorks .
Selenium is quite clever - it works by installing a test runner into the browser. The test runner then runs your code and reports the results back to the server.
Our client code coverage is still fairly low, but is improving quickly. We now have tests running for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera on Windows. We have also tested Firefox, Opera, Camino and Safari (not supported) on the Mac as well as Firefox on Linux.
We're quite happy with selenium and think it will help us to continue to improve each MapBuzz release.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Sat, 10 Jun 2006 18:58:00 GMT
Earlier this week we redirected ammonite to point at the new server hosted at Data393. The new server is running the latest MapBuzz release which includes two major new features – discussions and editing.
The discussions feature lets users add their own comments to maps, communities and users. Discussions are threaded, which means that users can reply to other user’s comments. This functionality lets users share information about maps and will be a major part of creating user communities on mapBuzz.
The editing functionality permits users to add their own features to maps. This includes simple point features such as restaurants as well as more complex features such as trails (linear features) or parks (area features). Users can also edit existing features by moving them around or changing their shapes.
We've also started working on two additional new features – rankings and data uploading. Rankings let users assign one to five stars to a map. These rankings are then averaged to provide an indication of which maps the user community finds most interesting.
Data uploading lets users who own handheld global positioning systems (commonly known as GPS devices) to load their data to mapBuzz. For example, users can create maps of their recent vacations by uploading location data from a handheld GPS device. Users can then attach additional information to the map such as notes or pictures and then share the map with friends and family.
Finally, we spent some time improving existing functionality. For example, we expanded search functionality so that you can search for users via email addresses, which was a commonly requested feature.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 07 Jun 2006 16:26:00 GMT
We've made it to 95% test coverage more quickly then planned. The current value is now 95.4%.
As expected, the increased test coverage unearthed some additional bugs that we hadn't seen before. These have been now logged and fixed.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Wed, 07 Jun 2006 00:31:00 GMT
Over the last couple of weeks you may have noticed that our test coverage has steadily increased. Today we broke through the 90% barrier for our server code. We'd like to get this as close to 100% as possible - our next goal is 95%.
Unfortunately, we don't have any automated tools to show us the test coverage of our client code (the code that runs in the browser). Hopefully with the renewed interest in browsers over the last year (think of Google Mail or Windows Live) someone will put together what we need as an open source project. There a few projects that are close, like Selenium, but don't yet provide code coverage tools.
Posted in Infrastructure | no comments
