Locale - the random day out generator

Locale - the random day out generator now supports the USA, Canada and Australia. Some of the suggestions are quite funny but it's good for discovering different places if nothing else!

Increased store limit

I've increased the store limit to 320 (originally 250) . The number of users continues to climb up - approaching 300 now. Thanks to the few (literally, 3) people who have donated! No major bugs have been identified (or at least brought to my attention).

As an aside, my latest mashup in progress is www.randomdayout. co.uk - a random day out generator!! UK only at the moment but USA,Canada and Australia to follow soon...

Same old same old

Not much new to report . A couple of helpful people have helped with the translations in French, German and Italian (relying on Babelfish = recipe for disaster!!). Also all references to stores have now been dropped so you can use blipstar to plot/search for anything now.

Diversification

I've been asked to produce a customised version of blipstar to provide a "find your nearest theater" (theater=cinema in the UK) function for a new film coming out - "One Night with the King". Nice variation on the store locator theme. Cool looking film too.

Couple of updates

Fixed a bug when exporting to Google Earth (to do with certain characters not allowed in XML in the name field) and added a Canada specific option by adding "CA=yes" as a search term in the URL. I think Ill make the specific country option more explicit (ie. on the map options page) but we'll see. Also thinking about letting people enter their own search term text to make it applicable to more than just stores (e.g. Find your nearest Cafe).

It's amazing that in the space of a week blipstar has gone from no hits on Google to lots and lots. It still says "did you mean flipstart?" though!!

Interesting times

A couple of people noted that charging users for using a site based on the Google Maps API would be breaking the terms of service. Although the charge was always for uploading/storing the store data I felt they had a fair point and I certainly don't want to do anything in bad faith. Blipstar was an experiment really although lots of people have registered so it's obviously not way off the mark.

So I decided to make blipstar free but giving people the chance to donate. As long as the bandwidth/hosting costs are met this should be okay. Although my dreams of doing this kind of thing full time will be put on hold - till the next idea of course! I really don't want to revert to advertising as that sucks...I don't even give them a second look. I guess lots of people must do though.

Quick bug fix

Over 100 users have registered an account in a couple of days which is pretty good. I've just fixed a couple of bugs with IE in terms of changing the window size and uploading images. Should work okay now.

TechCrunch

Got a bit of a shock when I saw blipstar mentioned on my TechCrunch RSS feed - nice shock though. It's one of my favourite Web 2.0 blogs/sites so quite an honour. Seemed generally positive although it says it has a Dutch version which is doesn't, yet (does Babel Fish do Dutch)?! Waiting for bug reports to come in but not had any yet - lots of people have registered which is a good start. Hope it doesn't gut Dugg as I don't want the site to grind to a halt!

New - UK demo

I got an email from mapperz saying the store locator demo doesn't work for UK postcodes, which it doesn't, as it was only designed for the US/Canada (should have made it clearer though). I've now added a new UK specific demo which allows you to enter a postcode and has a set of fictitious stores. Check it out here.

Now the hard work begins...

Phew! I've spent the past couple of months developing blipstar - a tool for businesses who need a "store locator" facility. It's powered by Google Maps and is now ready to roll. So next up is the "get it out there in the big wide world" part. This makes life interesting, especially with a low (i.e. non-existent) marketing budget.

OK, so how does blipstar work?

Basically, a company uploads their store's names/addresses which are then geocoded. Their store locator is auomatically created and hosted by blipstar - the company simply links to it from their site. The company can customise the look and feel of its store locator and for a customer to use it they simply enter a ZIP/postal code and it displays their nearest stores, plotted on an interactive map. They can get directions via Google Local/Maps.

It was fun to make and I'm pleased with how it's turned out, but being a one man band doesn't help in terms of marketing. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how things pan out. I've emailed a few blogs and things so watch this space.