How cool is this ????
Here’s a look at some ZoomIn traffic from last Sunday. The video was based on the realtime visualisation of ZoomIn using the glTrail tool by fudgie.org. (They also make the awesome gltail tool)
Who knew ZoomIn would build its own deathstar !
A while back I created a picture of ZoomIn as a graph. I wondered if its changed . Here’s the ZoomIn graph now.
We’ve been working on improving our YSlow ranking on ZoomIn Homepage. We scored 83 during the homepage audit 3 weeks ago, now we’ve managed to get it to 86.
To improve our YSlow ranking we been focusing on two things. First, we’ve been minifying our javascript & css. Second we’ve been improving our caching of javascript & css. (Which weren’t caching properly due to versioning problems)
From our optimisations, we’ve managed to shave an additional 9K from our javascript and css. It seems that our optimisation of whitespace etc wasn’t quite upto scratch! We’ve started using the excellent yui compressor to help with the optimisation of the files. We’ve also adopted a more formal asset control of our javascript / css using the rails plugin asset packager. It’s a great plugin to properly manage versions of our javascript etc. Now we can increase the Expiry tags for our CSS and Javascript way out, to maximise the cachability of our pages.
The next stage of our optimisation is to tune the number of images via the introduction of CSS sprites.
Recently, we’re looking at Google Analytics and we found that the bounce rate for one of our important pages had crept up to 50%. 🙁
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from that page) – the stat helps to determine the quality of the page.
Initially, we were a little perplexed and even arrogant when we were trying to figure out why people were exiting immediately. We started asking ourselves some questions…
Then we started to look at which pages the users were coming from, then it became clear that we’d mucked up the task flow of this particular action. We made some changes to the our task flow and the result were immediate and dramatic.
We had a 5 times improvement across those pages on the site it dropped from over 50% to 9% . And we’ve noticed 100% improvement in time on site as a result.
I can recommend that some analysis of your key metrics, can help you analyse whats working and whats not working on your site.
This morning, we migrated ZoomIn from rails 1.2.3 to rails 2.02 . The process was relatively painless. Its running about 10-15% faster than previously rails from the initial testing and it fixed the mysterious comma bug that affected rails routing.
Here’s the guide that we used to migrate – http://www.slashdotdash.net/articles/2007/12/03/rails-2-upgrade-notes
We had a couple other things that we found. First, when upgrading to capistrano 2, you will need to make sure that you use the right namespaces for steps that you have customised for the build recipe. Also, be wary of upgrading to RMagick 2, it requires a newer version of Imagemagick beyond what is default package for debian and ubuntu and RMagick has some compile problems as a result. We reverted to older version of RMagick to solve.
We’re in the process on migrating the rest of ProjectX applications over the next couple of days.
We’ve shifted the ZoomIn website from our hosting provider in the US to NZ.
In the lead up to Xmas, we had a number of issues with our hosting provider in the US, and we made the decision to move the site back to NZ. The site has been up since the weekend, and is noticeably faster 🙂
We like to think that our technology is being used solely for good rather than evil, but there are some applications where it’s hard to tell. Stalking would be a no-no, but celebrity stalking doesn’t seem so bad. That’s the purpose of the Wellingtonista Celeb Vista group on ZoomIn, which is fully explained in this post on the Wellingtonista.
Simply put, it’s a group for tracking celebrity sightings, but Wellington being Wellington, the celebs being stalked are somewhat more highbrow than on other celebrity-stalking mashups, hence the inclusion of Peter McLeavey along with Bret McKenzie and Shortland Streeters. At least there are no politicians … yet.
IntensCITY week, the celebration of Wellington’s urban spaces, is just about to kick off. A key part of the week is the INSite exhibition, which consists of eight shipping containers distributed around the city as artists’ spaces and installations. Here’s a ZoomIn group to show their locations (or you can go directly to the group map on ZoomIn).
As these are ZoomIn places, you can of course add your own photos and comments and edit the descriptions. I’ve kicked that process off, but if you manage to get some good photos or have some responses you want to share, please go ahead and do so.
While I may be a fan of the “intuitive” and “idiosyncratic” nature of neogeography, we all recognise the importance of getting the core geographic information right. We’re about to start a comprehensive update of all our mapping tiles, and while we were able to get out a relatively quick fix for the Wellington bypass, it will take a bit of effort to do it properly for the whole country.
While we pay good money for our base data, it’s a fact of life that nothing’s perfect, and the physical world sometimes moves too fast for surveyors, councils and data providers to keep up with. We already have a list of updates and corrections that we’ll probably have to make manually, and we’ve had useful reports from ZoomIn users that we’ve added to the list. But we want to ask you, our blog readers, whether you’ve noticed any errors, out-of-date areas or places that could do with a tweak.
Along with that, I’d like to know if there are any improvements we could make to the appearance of our maps. As just one example, as a supporter of pedestrian-friendly cities it has always seemed odd to me that pedestrian streets like Cuba Mall have the same symbology as dirt tracks through the bush. There’s a field in the raw data that distinguishes “malls” from walkways, and if I get the chance I’d like to represent the difference visually. Are there any visual quirks or infelicities that you’d like us to take a look at?
We can’t guarantee that we’ll get every suggestion into the upcoming map release, but we’re keen to get your feedback on what would make our maps the best they can be.
Here‘s an interesting definition:
Neogeography, as we see it, is a diverse set of practices that operate outside, or alongside, or in the manner of, the practices of professional geographers. Rather than making claims on scientific standards, methodologies of neogeography tend towards the intuitive, expressive, personal, absurd, and or artistic, but may just be idiosyncratic applications of “real” geographic techniques .
That resonates quite nicely with what we’re doing at ProjectX, especially with the community features of ZoomIn and some of the new features that we’re coming up with now. With my “urbanist hat” on, it reinforces for me the idea that a “place” is more than just a “space” or a set of coordinates: it’s about experience, memory and community.