Blipstar Pro

Blipstar Pro is up and running. Instead of loading in all the store data on the client and then doing the proximity search it does it using a special server side program. The beauty is that you edit the stores in exactly the same way - it's only the viewing that's different.

Someone is using already it with thousands of stores and it appears to cope fine, which I'm pleased with.

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.