Google maps, ZoomIn maps and et are like the MP3 of the GIS world. It has made mapping and spatial visualisation available to everyone with a browser. Just as MP3 maybe not be good enough for audiophiles, google maps is not going to be powerful enough for a lot of serious GIS work. The simplicity of Google maps is going drive the consumption of GIS information into a new era.
Congrats to Code Blacks, in winning the half-baked challenge. Yet again, we see that as in rugby having a home field advantage has merit.
Lots of rumours floating around about the silence of the judging panel in response to the Code Blacks pitch (except for Rowan as noted in the comments). And we heard that Rod left in disgust after being he and the other judge were snubbed in choosing the winner.
Anyways, it was a fun time, had by all and big thanks to all the Silicon Team, it was most entertaining.
I’m part of the Silicon All-Stars team in the webstock halfbaked challenge
Its seems like a bit of a no contest… a bunch of industry professionals (Code Blacks) vs a group of battle hardened entrepreneurs (Silicon Welly All-Stars). The excuses are already starting to flow..
The CodeBlacks have been hit with injuries and players signing to overseas leagues for exorbitant sums. In fact the team is down to only three original CodeBlacks…
OK, full credit to the code blacks, they did build a website in 24 hours, but you’re talking to seasoned entrepreneurs and our businesses crank out new products, websites and business ideas every other week!.
The Silicon Welly All-Stars have strong history, we’ve raised more money, won more awards, launched more products, released more code, marketed more ideas, hired more people!
And we have our secret weapon team captain Tim Norton – the fast mouth in the south. 5 minutes to pitch a new business, he’s already demo’d PlanHQ to world in 6 minutes.
10 reasons entrepreneurs need to have more vacations
Added on 04/20/2008 at 03:04PM
NSFW Blocker Using MooTools and CSS: How to dynamically mask images that are not safe for work
Added on 04/18/2008 at 11:29AM
IBM launches internal pilot program to test migration to Macs
Added on 04/18/2008 at 10:08AM
Fostering Innovation at Pixar
Added on 04/18/2008 at 09:45AM
Busy.js – javascript loading library
Added on 04/17/2008 at 09:34AM
Usingjs library – Managing Javascript dependencies
Added on 04/15/2008 at 01:01PM
KML is now a OGS standard
Added on 04/15/2008 at 10:21AM
More from 37 signals on Ricardo Semeler’s Maverick
Added on 04/15/2008 at 09:55AM
XMPP: Hat tip to Rowan for spotting the new technology
Added on 04/15/2008 at 09:12AM
Salesforce with Google Apps
Added on 04/14/2008 at 05:15PM
37 signals on Gary Vaynerchuk branding and marketing
Added on 04/10/2008 at 10:38AM
37 Signals on “Maverick ” – Ricardo Semler’s book : This is one of the best business books out therehellip
Added on 04/10/2008 at 10:31AM
Super Mario written in Javascript : All the Super Mario goodness in only 14k
Added on 04/09/2008 at 07:26PM
Heroku – RoR platform on the cloud
Added on 04/09/2008 at 05:23PM
The setup method for ActionController::TestCase is useful in some circumstances, e.g. having a user login in your tests.
def setup
super
login_as :quentin
end
However, when you run the tests, all your tests with login_required fails.
Basically, this is a bug in Rails 2.0.2 where setup is not called. This was fixed in revision 8442 (one revision after rails 2.0.2 was released). See http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/10568
So, we would want that revision by using:
rake rails:freeze:edge REVISION=8442
NOTE: rubyonrails.org is down/domain expired so rake might fail. In the meantime, try svn export or some other way to get revision 8442 from another repository.
UPDATE: rubyonrails.org is back up (domain renewed)!
I’ve decided to create a RSS (Blog) feed to aggregate all of the RSS from all of the NZ mapping and spatial companies. I thought it would a great idea to promote a single RSS feed to the industry to promote ideas, products etc.
After a quick look at some of the top players in the space, very few have RSS feeds. (Which is very disappointing!)
If you know of a blog that should be on this list either email me john at projectx.co.nz or add it on the wiki page I have created at barcamp wiki.
Spatial bar camp is being held in Wellington on the 1st of May. They are running a spatial mash-up competition in which they are asking companies or people mashing spatial data. More information at http://barcamp.org.nz/wellington-spatial-mash-2008-1-may-2008
ProjectX will be submitting 2-3 entries, showcasing our new visualisation engine.
We’ve just taken another looking at Google sitemaps for the first time in a long while. We’ve had mixed resulting using the sitemaps. Changes that we’ve made were taking weeks to come through. So with all the frustration at the way Google indexes our site, we decided to write a little program that parses our weblogs and looks at our crawler traffic. Its been incredibly useful to see what the google crawler is upto.
Here’s how it helped us, as we refine our SEO for our recent photos page, we got to see the effects to the crawler and on the site.
Our Google sitemap had this :
<url>
<loc>http://www.zoomin.co.nz/?recent/photos</loc>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
And this was our traffic before the changes
2008-04-10 /?recent/photos MSN [65.55.209.80]
2008-04-10 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-10 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-09 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-08 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-08 /?recent/photos Yahoo [74.6.29.187]
2008-04-07 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.94]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [74.6.29.187]
2008-04-05 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.94]
2008-04-05 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.99]
We changed the changefreq to always and it seems to have had an affect.
<url>
<loc>http://www.zoomin.co.nz/?recent/photos</loc>
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
Using the always change frequency tag denotes that a page is dynamic and changes all the time. Our photo page doesn’t change all the time, but it wasn’t getting indexed by google as often as the content has been changing.
The change had an effect within 24 hours of changing our sitemap.
Displaying 1-25 of 70
Date Place Crawler
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.58.157]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-11 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
We’re currently thinking about making our seo tool opensource, as its really useful for medium sized sites to figure out what Google is upto.
Just upgraded our ProjectX blog to wordpress 2.5. It was amazing easy to upgrade and instructions are really comprehensive. So far, I really like the backend . They have really improved the whole interface. Most actions that I want to do are now within the first screen roll.
Nice work to the WordPress team.
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.
