Archive for July, 2007

Stickymap reaches 10,000 unique markers!

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Max and I are very excited to announce that Stickymap has reached a great milestone. On July 23, Bob Smith, an avid user of Stickymap, created a marker called Sears in Lincoln Village, just north of Stockton California. This marker is the ten thousandth unique marker added by our users to the Stickymap database. You can visit the marker by clicking here: http://www.stickymap.com/?m=10000 

We’re especially proud to reach this milestone, as Stickymap approaches its second birthday. For those of you who are wondering what the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety ninth marker is, Bob Smith created it as well, a J.C. Penny within the Weberstown mall. http://www.stickymap.com/?m=9999

Posted in Development updates | 44 Comments »

Our thoughts on “Web 2.0” development

Friday, July 27th, 2007

Currently, there is a great opportunity for innovation. Our team has tried to take the best of each available resource to create a dynamic system that empowers the web. Presently, large web companies have created a new niche by making expensive to develop technologies available to the masses. In addition, free software licensed under the GNU General Public License provides developers with low cost, easy to manipulate tools. This open source environment creates a system of trust between internet web corporations (Yahoo and Google) and software/web developers. The web corporations have provided a jumpstart to innovators through large capitol investment that funds the creation of new technologies. While the success of the web companys’ investments lie in the trust and acceptance of developers, the innovator has faith that the technology will be reliable, ideally free and open source.
While the web appears to be removing barriers, one major issue still persists. Before beginning this project, the team consisted of web developer amateurs. We have found that the development of our technology was impeded by the terrible differences of structure between the internet browsers. We strongly feel that the lack of standards obstructs the growth of the World Wide Web by increasing development costs. We encourage software companies to adopt universal codes.

Posted in Development updates, Web Development Tips | 32 Comments »

New Version Update

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

As of today, we are still hard at work on our interface updates. Some of our ideas are coming into a clearer focus. Creating a marker is going to be very easy – we have been able to make good use the “info window” from Google Maps. However, we don’t want to make creation too easy. Unlike Google mymaps, we’re going to ask our users to make sure they’re not posting a duplicate. The trick is to strike a balance between the integrity of our data and the flow of user experience.

More specific updates are to come soon. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get some screen shots up here.

Max

Posted in Development updates, Google Maps API, Interface | 1 Comment »

Forms in Internet Explorer

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

For all you web developers who may be out there and interested – I’m working hard to ensure that the next version of Stickymap has greater cross-browser support.  Today I found that the <form> element of HTML works differently in Internet Explorer than from other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox.

On IE, a lot of blank space is left above and below the form.   On Firefox, the form is treated like any other block element.

In order to fix the IE spacing problems with forms and to make it behave more like Firefox, I just added the following lines to my style sheet:

form {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}

Posted in Web Development Tips | 3 Comments »

Integration with Yahoo Local Search

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Stickymap currently makes use of the Yahoo Local Search API, but we can do better. Right now, Yahoo Local is one of the three search options, and it’s a feature that’s very detached from the rest of the site. Markers are rarely created from Yahoo’s database.

We’re hoping to change this with the next release. Stickymap search results are going to be merged with the Yahoo results, to create a universal and customizable search. Yahoo results and Stickymap results should be able to mix as seamlessly as possible.

Posted in Local search, Marker creation, Yahoo Local API | 4 Comments »

Stickymap wins Yale Entrepreneurship Executive Summary competition

Monday, July 9th, 2007

Neighborhood Resources LLC is proud to announce that the Stickymap project won 3rd place in Yale Entrepreneurial Society’s Executive Summary Competition (Y2K), Social Entrepreneurship category. We prepared the executive summary over the course of several months with the help of two Yale undergraduate interns who are currently studying economics. We are particularly pleased with this success; not only does it validate our plan to help communities grow and succeed, but it also suggests that there is a strong need for our map tools. We also believe that this award is another reason for community groups, non-profits, and associations to trust our technology and support our efforts. If community groups want to share their neighborhoods, we want to be their first choice.

You can see the Yale announcement here: http://www.yesatyale.org/y2k.php
Dan

Posted in Development updates | 3 Comments »

Stickymap hires a graphic designer

Saturday, July 7th, 2007

Neighborhood Resources LLC is very excited to announce the hiring of a graphic designer to help improve the design of the website. In the next few days, we’ll hopefully be able to replace some of the simple placeholder images with high quality material. So that you can take a look at his graphics portfolio, we’ll try to post a link to his website as well as feature some of his work within the blog. Right now, he’s creating a new Stickymap logo.

We’re looking to expand our graphics team and have just made a few positions available to summer interns. Do not hesitate to contact us if you want to join Stickymap’s graphics team.

Dan

Posted in Graphics, Interface, Press releases | 48 Comments »

Share and create personal maps on Stickymap

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

We’ve recently implemented a really cool tool that allows every user to create his own maps and share them with friends. To create a map with locations of your choice just follow a few easy steps.

First, find the marker that you would like to place in your map. If the marker already exists, then move to step two. If the marker does not exist, then you’ll have to create it. Just use the marker creation tool to quickly create the marker.

Second, tag the marker with an appropriate description. If you’re having trouble understanding the tagging system, think of the tags as categories. Just place the marker in a category that best describes the marker.

Third, go to your Stickymap personal profile page and create a personal map of the markers that you tagged. Please understand that the tagging feature is only available to users who are registered.

Let us know if you have any questions or trouble creating your maps.

Dan

Posted in Development updates, Interface, Marker creation | 3 Comments »

Marker Creation Update

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007

This week we continue working on marker creation. The new marker creation app is going to be a lot more user friendly than the old. Here I describe a few of the changes we’ll be making. Keep your suggestions coming!

1) We’re going to make good use of the infowindows in Google Maps. These are bubbles that appear above the markers. They will be positioned correctly, so we don’t have to worry about them hiding the view of the actual marker.

2) The interface will include our new and improved icon selector, which will appear on a redesigned, dynamic sidebar and/or in an infowindow.

3) Google Map’s marker dragging feature will allow users place the marker just where they want it. It smooth and must easier to use and understand.

4) The FCK editor – which is the fancy text area used for marker descriptions – will be loaded only when it is needed. This means it will no longer have to be loaded when first going to stickymap.com, which will improve our load times.

Posted in Google Maps API, Interface, Marker creation, Usability | 68 Comments »