Upon request from several community organizations using our community mapping tool, we’ve updated our FAQ and Tutorials sections. We added some new Flash step-by-step tutorials to explain how to create SuperMaps, and answered some questions that we’ve been asked.
If you do not find these helpful, please contact us and let us know how we can help.
Today we launched a website for the city of New Haven, Connecticut – newhaven.stickymap.com. We have been receiving requests from community leaders to create a site that will allow the residents of the city to share their knowledge of individual neighborhoods, favorite places, restaurants, and other businesses. Now, the entire city of New Haven can interact and local community organizations can create and share maps of their projects. Please take some time to explore the maps that New Haven community organizations have created. We find them incredibly rich with information that only an Elm City resident can provide!
Over the next few weeks, we plan to create websites for several other cities in New England in which community organizations have shown an interest in creating maps of their neighborhoods. And please let us know if you would like to have a website created for the city in which you live.
Wow! I can’t believe how many problems this server upgrade has caused.
The good news is that all of the problems from yesterday have been resolved. This means that you can now browse the map and post markers!
However, we’ve discovered another problem with uploading photos and community logos. We’re working on getting that up again as soon as possible.
Max
As of now, we are still in the process of upgrading to our dedicated server. It is taking a lot longer than we like, and there are a lot of complications involved. First, while we were waiting to get our nameserver switched to the other site, stickymap.com was still pointing to the old server even though our database was already copied over. Therefore, when people posted markers in that intrim period they “disappeared” when stickymap.com finally pointed to the right place. We turned this around by copying over the newly created markers (and user profiles, photos, etc.) to the new server. But – was that a pain!
Then there were some other problems when our hosting company transferred us over. They failed to transfer our .htaccess file, which means that stickymap.com/mappage would no longer forward to stickymap.com/mappage.php. The apache software that was installed made it impossible to access our “icons” folder, which is reserved in apache, which is why our icons are not showing up, and some php settings were changes which is causing some warnings on our local pages.
So, sorry about the service disruption today and tomorrow. We’ll try to get this back up and running smoothly as soon as possible.
Max
Today, we released the community toolkit. We also pushed a new front page along with some tutorials so that you can easily see more of Stickymap’s features. Hopefully, there will be a lot of news to share shortly!
Today we really cleaned out the site in preparation for the long awaited launch of our Community Organization tools. In order to complete this immense and daunting task, we’ve recruited some help from Daniel Fichter, a quality assurance engineer in New York.
We spent the whole day in full development mode in our Fairfield offices, now that the facilities are setup and the internet is working. As promised, I have attached some pictures of this space. Maybe we’ll get some more action shots in the future.
As of right now, we are on our final task, which is to finalize the tutorials that will describe how to use the site and the tools for community organizations. This will be linked from a new front page, which will go live shortly.
Max
Today, with myself in from New York and Dan in from Los Angeles, we temporarily set up shop in Fairfield, Connecticut. This office space will be used to develop Stickymap.com to it’s full potential as we make a big push this month. Our team is racing forward with a myriad of clean-up tasks as we map out our strategy. This is a milestone day for Nieghborhood Resources. Look for news in the near future and hopefully some pictures of our setup.
And of course, check it out on Stickymap.
Max
We’re still in the process of polishing the community group system today. I worked on a directory for the community groups, where they are sorted into state and county. Every community group operating in the same county gets grouped together, so that you can see all that’s getting done in a particular location. I also worked on a system of creating SuperMaps out of Personal Maps, which is a merge of many personal maps.
Today we switched over to a new “blue” color scheme for the sidebar. I know it feels a little strange at first, but you’ll get used to it – it has a more open feel than the slate gray.
In addition, we implemented the changes talked about in the last post where you add markers to personal maps intead of categorizing or tagging it.
We’re also gathering up many new icons that will go out in the near future!
Max