ProjectX Blog

Having just read about Splogs in the September wired magazine, my last post got 3 spam comments within 30 minutes of being posted. ARRRRGGHH bloody spam!!!

I used to use google blogsearch to track blog interest in ProjectX and ZoomIn. Unfortunately now 80% of the results are spam blogs. It is really annoying!

On the subject of spam, I have decide to shift my personal mail to google mail’s hosted domain service. I get over 50 spams a day. That doesn’t count the thousands of attempts to send spam to every possible address combination that may reside at my domain. I have been really unhappy with the spamassassin filters of late and after spending last weekend trying to tune them, I have finally given up.

I have basially shift the spam burden to google. I figure that they have a high vested interest in sorting it out. And as an added bonus I have to maintain one less thing. I am testing it out over the next week and then I’ll convert the ProjectX mail across.

We’ve started adding new data to the ZoomIn. With the new maps comes a lot more data.

So far, we’ve added:

• Emergency services like: Police Stations, Fire Stations and Ambulance depots
• Golf courses
• Car Parks

Coming soon:

• Schools and Educational Institutions
• Places of Worship
• Hospital and Medical centres
• Parks and Recreation areas

We’re adding all of the places to map, so you can access the zoomin goodness ie adding comments, and pictures etc.

ProjectX and Smaps are in the news…

We’ve been busy upgrading the ZoomIn Mapping System API’s and updating the developer websites.

ZoomIn Mapping System

• New Mapping Functionality: We have had a lot of requests from our API users for the ability to draw circles. We’ve added the GCircle function to the API in the latest update.
• New Geo-coders for New Zealand users: We upgraded the Geo-coding API to fix some bugs and improved performance. Please note: Version 1 of the Geo-coding API will be depreciated on the 1st October 2006

Here is a table explaining which Geo-coding API to use:

Geo-coder API Version	Map Projection	Map Layer	Example API call
v2	NZMG	Zoomin.NZMG Zoomin.NZMGAerial	<a href=”http://geocoder.zoomin.co.nz/v2/search? apikey=9b22d1fc2790e143c9549302fa6a137d33fb0086& location=115%20willis%20street%20wellington”> http://geocoder.zoomin.co.nz/v2/…
v3	NZTM	Zoomin.NZMG	<a href=” http://geocoder.zoomin.co.nz/v3/search? apikey=9b22d1fc2790e143c9549302fa6a137d33fb0086& location=115%20willis%20street%20wellington”> http://geocoder.zoomin.co.nz/v3/…

ZoomIn Developer website

• New key request system: We have added a new key request system. You can now request production keys via the developer site. You will need to request a separate key to use the geocoder. We have made the changes to the API system to simplify the reporting for our users.

Tim from Decisive Flow posted a blog article last week about 5 tools to help with your productivity. I would like to throw non web 2.0 tools into the mix.

Sugar

The opensource Customer Relationship and Sales Management system. I have been using Sugar for the last 9 months for our contact management and Sales. Its a great tool for tracking your sales pipeline. The new version of Sugar is in the process of being Ajax’d.

Printable CEO

David Seah has designed a number of paper based tools called the Printable CEO Series to help you track your tasks and improve your productivity. He has incorporated some the GTD principles with intelligent design to provide a suite of paper based tools. Here is a snippet of some of the tools in the Printable CEO collection

One of the Creative HQ residents, Chaos Dimention have released a beta version of their new book site –chaosprofessionals.co.nz. The site is an online book seller specialising in Technical and Business books. So whats the differentiator to Whitcoulls and Fishpond? All the books listed on the site have one price inclusive of shipping.

So I decided to the site to the Pepsi Challenge versus Whitcoulls and Fishpond and see what the prices are really like….

So you can see that you can save a bit of money by shopping at Chaos. The site is still in Beta, so be nice. Tomar and Chaos would love yourfeedback, so drop them a line if you have any suggestions.

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I have just been looking for a book on Amazon and I have noticed that they have added a new option to their buying process (only seems to be on some of their books) – “See all buying options”. This allows you to look different prices of booksellers from around the world.

Wow! Is this the long tail in action? Amazon aggregating books from around the world, so I can shop around for the best price. At first glance this looks great, I can select the book from the seller close to me. The reality is now I have more work to buy a find the best priced book. I have to check all the sellers for their shipping options, shipping costs and delivery times and figure out total cost of the books. Hmmm, what about returns, do I have send it back to the seller, or to Amazon , more work to find out! What a pain in *! 

Ok, Ok I am whinging, but with good reason. I loved the fact that I could just use one click shopping and everything just worked.

So how can they fix it?
First, they should extend their onclick buying to include shipping costs. This would allow me to make a real comparison between sellers.
Second, what about enabling me to sort the list of sellers by total price (+shipping) and or delivery times to my 1click address.

That would proper comparison shopping without the work!

I suppose this is a reminder that new features aren’t always good for all your customers. By adding new features, you might alienate some of your customers, who are happy with the current options. Frustrated and unhappy, your customers may start to look elsewhere. This is another example where customer driven development would be more beneficial.

I’ve just been talking to a client and I thought I should remind everyone that you all should be using httpd compression on your websites!

HTTPD Compression

What is it ?

HTTPD compression is used to compress delivery of web content from the server to the browser. Typically httpd compression delivers compressed HTML, CSS and XML files. There are compression modules for all the major webservers.

Why compress?
If everyone is shifting to broadband, whats the point. The reality is the most people are still on modems or on crappy ISDN connections. By compressing your site, you make sure the site is fast and snappy for all your customers. Customers are accessing your site from all over the world.

How fast is it?

It depends on the file hit ratio of your site. On the auction site that I used to run, about 80% of the hits were images and remaining 20% were HTML, CCS and Javascript files. But suprisingly in terms of Kilobytes size transferred the Images only made up 48% and the text a whopping 52% . So 20% of the hits translates into 50% of the data being transmitted to the browsers.

Compression savings is anything from 300-500% depending on the size of the file. That represents a lot of time saved for your users.

What are the benefits ?

1. Bandwidth saved: You would save at least 15-30% of your bandwidth usage. Bandwidth costs are expensive, so any saving is a boon!
2. Speed up HTML rendering: The HTML page loads first, but compressing the page you can speed up rendering by 2-3 times. Snappy delivery is absolutely important in improving the user experience.
3. Its easy: There are many modules that are easy to add.
4. Its Free: There are plenty of free modules for Apache and IIS.
5. It works with all browsers: IE4 and above, NS4 and above, Any Mozilla , Opera !

Who’s using it?

Finally, a number of the big sites are starting to use it. Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Trade Me. . You can check out pipeboost to see how much they are saving.

Resources

• Pipeboost – An easy way to when the effectiveness of compressing your pages. Paste in your links and see how much you can save.
• Andrew King’s Site – The book “Speed up your site” started it all for me. When I read this book I felt sick that I had never implemented this before! That was 18 months ago, and I still surprised that EVERY website isn’t compressing their content!. Make sure you don’t make the same mistake!

BONUS TIP:
You can use the websiteoptimization tools to check how big all of the components are.

We’ve been having some problems with comment system on our blog. I upgraded to version 4 of Typo.

What a mission!

Big tip, you need to run “rake migrate RAILS_ENV=production” to sort out the migration errors.

Its working properly now and I have switched to a new theme. Not sure if I like the colour scheme, but it nice to have a proper side bar.

<centre>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
//<![CDATA[
window.onload = function(){
map = new GMap2($(“mapview”));
map.addMapType(new Zoomin.NZTM);
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl());
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(5427050, 1748750), 6);

// Add a polyline with some random points.
var points = [];
for (var i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
var point = new GLatLng(
map.getBounds().getSouthWest().lat() + map.getBounds().toSpan().lat() * Math.random(),
map.getBounds().getSouthWest().lng() + map.getBounds().toSpan().lng() * Math.random());

points.push(point);
map.addOverlay(new GMarker(point));
}

map.addOverlay(new GPolyline(points, ”#FF00FF”,”5”,”0.6”));
}
//]]>
</script>
</centre>

Announcing the ZoomIn Mapping System v7

We have been working hard on the new version of the ZMS.

New features include:

• Polylines support
• Dynamic Changing of Layers
• Sliding Scale bar
• Prototype javascript library support
• Performance Tweaks
• Improved event handling

Have a look at developer.zoomin.co.nz for more information.

The new API will be available for Australia shortly.