Thrillist apparently just mailed out about PadMapper on The List (http://www.thrillist.com/new-york/padmapper), and now the server is on fire and the traffic chart just smashed all other days into a flat line. Hopefully it runs OK for everyone.
Archives for January 2009
Hello KillerStartups.com
So, I just woke up, and there’s already more visits than there were yesterday. Actually, it’s the second highest traffic day ever so far, and it’s closing fast on #1, and all this before noon. Turns out almost all of it is from KillerStartups.com. Thanks for visiting guys! I kind of figured that sites usually email ahead before they try to murder a small webapp’s server, but I guess I was wrong 🙂
But seriously, thanks for coming, and if you have any suggestions, please let me know (padmapper@gmail.com). And if any international visitors know of any sites like craigslist that would adapt easily to this (with listings that have some address), please let me know. I’ve already tried adding Craigslist listings for the major cities worldwide, but there didn’t seem to be any listings with addresses when I looked.
Thanks for reading, enjoy your stay, and please vote for PadMapper on KillerStartups.
Dialogs Replaced, other changes
Over the past couple of days, I’ve replaced all of the jQuery UI dialogs with custom dialogs, starting with the favorites window, and now finishing with the picture viewer and miscellaneous other dialog boxes. This was due to issues with various browsers, and I didn’t think that any of the existing dialog boxes could benefit from the power of the jquery dialog (resizeability, moveability, etc.).
Besides changing the dialogs, the favorites window went from opaque as a dialog, to transparent when I replaced it, to opaque again. It was a bit hard to read when transparent due to the small text. Being opaque, though, it doesn’t fit as well with the other. Also, it makes it less convenient to leave it open, since one can no longer see things that open partially behind it. The opacity is probably a step up in usability overall, though. Let me know if I am wrong on this.
New Favorites List Thing
I just released a replacement for the favorites list, in the form of a minimizable transparent box that can be shown and hidden by clicking the blue band on the right. It should be more flexible and forgiving of different screen sizes than the old version, and it eliminates the annoying problem of the window expanding when it’s first shown due to the initial position of the dialog box being slightly off. Hopefully it will be a bit more intuitive and pleasant to use than that which it replaces.
The replacement lacks a bit of functionality (it’s not moveable or resizeable by itself), but these were mainly ways to fix its problems. Not having a wrench isn’t much of a problem when bolts unscrew themselves.
New Stuff is Back, IE Sucks, and New Features
The UI is back to its newer form, following some fixes, cursing, and Internet-Explorer-specific javascript code. Sorry to the 30 or so people who came while the old version was up.
Speaking of Internet Explorer, I’ve decided to not really stress about supporting IE. I stopped short of putting up an alert telling IE users to use a real browser, but even without any layout issues, IE 6/7’s javascript performance is atrocious, and since PadMapper is a very javascript-heavy application, IE’s PadMapper performance is atrocious. I could make it easier on the browsers by reducing the max number of points shown, but I don’t want to diminish everyone else’s experience for the sake of the IE users (only about 20% of users that come use IE versus 50% for Firefox, 18% for Safari, and 9% for Chrome). If I find some time, I’ll give IE an alternate maximum number of points.
Here’s hoping IE 8 is browser enough to take on PadMapper. Sorry if that was ranty, but I wasted most of the day debugging IE-related issues.
Anyway, the two main new things for today are:ÂÂ
- PadMapper is now extracting the number of bathrooms from the descriptions of the listings (this is not perfect yet, so take the bathroom numbers with a grain of salt, especially if you see a place with 25 bathrooms but only 1 bedroom). This comes with a nifty slider to specify the minimum number you want. It might be a few days before there are a lot of listings with bathroom numbers – most are still unknown. Please flag any inaccurate listings.
- Sublets! A number of people asked for this, so here they are. When you’re looking around the city you’re interested in, you can turn off the visibility of sublet places, non-sublet places, or you can see or hide both. Look for the checkboxes at the bottom of the filter box. One thing to note – sometimes people list single room sublets as 2 or 3 bedroom places because that’s what the full apartment is, and this plays havok with the price per bedroom number. Feel free to mark these as inaccurate. Please let me know if these are frequent enough to be bothersome, and I’ll try tweaking the way it works.
I’ve got a couple of very cool things to work on soon that will hopefully make it easier to keep track of what has been seen. I’m also talking with a realtor about getting her no-fee listings up, so hopefully that’ll provide everyone with some higher-than-Craigslist-quality listings, at least in New York City. If anyone knows any realtors in NYC or elsewhere that might want their listings on here, please let me know.
Falling Backwards
Hey everyone. There were some problems with the sliders and FF2/IE6 in the newest build, so I had to regress to a week-old version of PadMapper which seems to work better. Sorry about that, hopefully the newest version will be back up soon (plus some of the stuff I’ve been working on over the past couple of days).
You might notice that there are sublet listings showing up as well. That’s one of the things I’ve been working on. Unfortunately, the ability to filter out sublets or non-sublets went away with the regression. Hopefully this isn’t too annoying. I’ll try to get the new version fixed, tested, and up by tomorrow.