It's About TIME...

Well, I finally did it. And I can't believe I haven't done it earlier!

I'm talking about optimizing graphics. By this, I mean both the listing photos as well as the logos and pictures that appear on your web site or search.

Earlier this week, I launched some tweaks to the listing detail photos, such as a new slide show and a way of compressing and caching these photos for a nicer presentation - and honestly, to save some bandwidth on our end! There were a couple of hiccups (nobody liked the very first new slideshow, for one), but we got them worked out! Thanks for your patience on that.

As a result of all of that graphic tweaking, I started fiddling with something that I'd wanted to concentrate on for a long time - the personal photos and logos that you can upload to personalize your service. I honestly didn't realize how much this was overdue!

I'd always left it up to you to optimize and resize your own graphics, the result of which were that some folks would end up loading a 1 MEGABYTE photo on their ListingWare and then wonder why it loaded slow! Or wonder why a picture with natural format of 600 pixels high by 400 pixels wide "looked funny" when constrained to only 88 pixels high by our program. I'm not scolding anyone on that - I'm sorry that I didn't assist earlier with something that most people have no time or inclination to deal with!

I've gone through and changed everyone's graphics to a more optimal size and format and made it so that future uploads do so also. I've even given the ability to delete the old graphics, if desired. I'm going to add a few more graphics manipulation tools as we move closer to launching some much-needed upgrades to our own web site templates, too.

SORRY FOR NOT PAYING ATTENTION TO THIS IMPORTANT PIECE SOONER! All better now, though!

DynaMap, Version 2.0

Wow - I've been a Bad Blogger! I hadn't realized that there were NO posts since before Christmas...that's not the way to do it. Well, there have been LOTS of things going on since before the holidays, but it's all just flown by. Anyhow, "Now, to the News"...

I've been working feverishly lately on improvements to DynaMap, which has been around for a while. The first and most obvious change is that it's now using Microsoft Virtual Earth rather than Google Maps. Some of you have actually thought DynaMap = Google Maps. We had intentionally NOT been specific to Google Maps because it did have some shortcomings, even when we originally launched DynaMap. MS has done a great deal to catch up to - and even pass - Google in certain aspects of their mapping system, so we're switching over to it (for now). Because DynaMap is our product name and just means that it uses some sort of dynamically-generated map with listing overlays, we aren't committed to one system or another.

The map-based searching of DynaMap has been updated to hopefully be a little more intuitive in its search style. The standard search results can now also be plotted in DynaMap format, providing another way to look at selected results.

Finally, when viewing an individual listing on a large-format map, you can even search for local businesses! You'll see up to 20 results of any sort of 'what' query that you run - 'schools', 'banks', even 'pizza'. So, your users can now find the stuff that's around where they are looking.