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.
Community Group Directory
September 30th, 2007Changes Today: Color Scheme, Local Page
September 19th, 2007Today 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
New Terminology for Categories: Personal Maps
September 9th, 2007A few weeks ago, I posted about our categories feature and asked for feedback on how to make it more understandable to use. This led to an interface upgrade which was already in development, which simply made categorizing less cumbersome.
Now based on some of our feedback from that post, we have decided on a terminology change: categories will now be called “personal maps”. It will still work much the same way, but we want to emphasize the fact that you can use this feature to group markers together and create maps that are subsets of the larger Stickymap.
We expect this change over the next week. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback.
Placement of the American Museum of Natural History
September 7th, 2007Today, our Quality Assurance team noticed a discrepancy on the placement of the American Museum of Natural History in Google Maps versus on Stickymap.
Take a look at this result from Google Maps. Notice that it puts you on Park Avenue on the Upper East Side. The actual museum is on the West Side, as the address tells you. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a map where you can simply move items or alert the administrators if it is incorrectly placed? Well, you can move markers on Stickymap. Take a look at the American Museum of Natural History on Stickymap below:
Using Stickymap in the classroom (an educational tool)
September 7th, 2007Over the last few weeks, we have been looking for teachers who would be interested in testing our community organization toolbox. The tool allows community organizations to create custom maps of their neighborhoods, share their maps with their community of users, and embed the maps on their websites. One group that we feel may wish to use the website are school teachers. We believe that school teachers who want to encourage their students to learn about their neighborhoods and develop strong writing and interviewing skills might be interested in creating a custom map together. Students would interview local residents about a location, write a short article, and upload photos to the website. The class can then create a custom map that they will be able to share with their peers. We do not believe that there is an easier and more exciting way to learn about geography!
If you’re interested in volunteering to beta test our community organization tool in your classroom, please let us know!
Dan
Refining Stickymap’s Community Organization mapping tool
September 5th, 2007For the last few weeks, we have been refining the Community Organization custom mapping tool, that allows non-profits, community groups, associations, and societies to create custom maps of their neighborhoods. The tool will allow groups to share maps with their community members, and will provide an interactive interface for the groups to demonstrate their group’s impact. The map can easily be embedded in websites by copying a snippet of html code. If you are interested in joining our group of beta testers in creating maps for your project, please contact us.
Selecting Stickymap Icons: Performance Upgrades
August 28th, 2007Some knowledge of the web development process is required for this post…
Some of you Internet Explorer users may have noticed that while using the sifter or creating a marker the icon selector was way is slow. Well, not anymore – we’ve introduced some upgrades yesterday, so be sure to clear your cache and enjoy fast loading of the icon selector.
Why was is slow? Was the server taking too long to respond with the icons? Were the images taking too long to load?
It turns out to be neither. The problem was string concatenation. Yes, after the information about the possible icons are retrieved from the server and before the images of each icon are loaded, the HTML list of icons is constructed. The code was doing that was very inefficient – going through each icon and concatenating it onto a very long string. IE constructs a new string every time that happens. That means if there are 100 characters for every item in the list, and 100 icons in the list, that’s
100 + 200 + 300 + 400 + … + 10000 = 505,000 character operations!
That’s too much. So after discovering this issue, I switched to a more efficient method for concatenating the strings. I put the HTML string for each row into an array. Then I used the array.join(” “) function in javascript to put them all together. My guess is that the time for this operation is proportional to the number of characters involved. Using the same assumptions as above, that’s 100 x 100 = 10,000. It seems like a lot, but your computer can do this very quickly. That’s fifty times as fast as the way we were doing it before!
So for all you javascript programmers out there, there is a moral: if you has a large number of strings that you want to concatenate, use array.join(” “) instead of looping through the values. Thanks to that, you can enjoy a better experience on Stickymap!
Categories: Interface Upgrade Planned
August 22nd, 2007Categories are a little-known feature in Stickymap. When you log in and click a location, you can select “categorize” to bring you to the categorization screen. From here, you can place locations into different categories which are labeled by text (or “tags” as we call them). After doing some studies, we’ve concluded that the interface for categories is a little bit hard to follow, so we’ve decided to try to simplify it for our users.
It’s important to get people using this because it will improve our site’s search capability and general organization. It also allows users to create their own maps that are subsets of Stickymap.
Right now, users need to mark off a series of check boxes, and fill out some text boxes. If you put a tag in a text box, it won’t be added to the marker unless you click the check box. I believe that’s been tripping up some of our users.
We’re in the final stages of preparing a release for a new interface. Let us know what would get you to use this feature.
Max
Stickymap Reviewed on www.which.co.uk
August 17th, 2007The UK site whick.co.uk decided to review8 mapping websites, and Stickymap.com was selected as one of the eight. All eight of these websites are unique in their own way, and we’re happy to be selected among them. We’re trying to increase that score on usability, but I think our performance is generally okay (loading markers is faster than on comparable sites). You can check out the review stub here.
You need to be a member to see the full review, which I am not. If anyone here is a member, we’re obviously interested in knowing what else it says.
Max
Spotlight: The Sifter
August 16th, 2007It’s been a long time since we’ve discussed the sifter – if we’ve ever discussed it here at all. The seemingly mysterious feature to new users was introduced on our site last summer. It has turned out to be a fun way to view markers on the map, and it’s usefulness grows as the site itself grows.
The sifter allows you to immediately see every marker posted with a certain icon. For example, if you want to see all the ice cream places posted in the country, just open the sifter and select “ice cream”. If there are too many ice cream places, you may have to zoom in, but once you do that they will all come into view, and you won’t have to zoom in any further to find them.
As the number of markers on our site grows (10.5K at the moment), the sifter will become a more powerful tool when there are too many markers to “view all” and too wide a range to search. The sifter also gives us a quick visual sample of how densely populated with markers an area has become, and where certain icons are being more frequently posted.
Max