CommunityWalk Blog

Email Bug

2009-01-05T12:24:00.000-08:00

We've just discovered a bug with our email system that was preventing emails from being sent out properly. If you were missing a verification email, this is why.

The problem has been fixed and emails are being send out properly now. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Performance Upgrades

2008-12-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

We will be working on some performance upgrades to the site in the coming weeks. If you notice and improvements or degradations to the performance of your map please let us know.

CommunityWalk on the IPhone

2008-08-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

I will be attending the Outside Lands concert this weekend. For those who haven't heard of it, it's a huge concert in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco featuring bands like Radio Head, Beck, Ben Harper, Wide Spread Panic, Drive By Truckers, and dozens others.

I also recently got a 3G IPhone with GPS so I've been looking for an easy way to take advantage of CommunityWalk with the IPhone to give me a custom map to find my way between stages at the concert.

So I created a map of the different stages:

http://www.communitywalk.com/san_francisco/ca/sf_outside_lands/map/283341

and I figured out a way to get this to show up in the Google Maps application on the IPhone so that I can take advantage of the GPS.

If you click the link below on an IPhone then the Google Maps App will open up and the search box will be prefilled with this:

http//www.communitywalk.com/xml/kml/283341

If you insert a colon after the "http" and hit search then the map will load will all of the correct markers. For some reason if you include the colon in the original url then it doesn't open the Google Maps App correctly...

Here's the link:

http://maps.google.com/?q=http//www.communitywalk.com/xml/kml/283341

So just click the link and then add a colon after the "http" and hit search.

Slightly Improved Printing

2008-07-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

We've finally gotten around to fixing a bug with printing maps where the list of locations in the print out was out of order. We've finally fixed it and made it so that they will adjust their order if you have multiple tabs selected in the map.

Explore Functionality Disabled

2008-06-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

As CommunityWalk grows we want to ensure that we give our paying customers as reliable and fast a service as we can. We've made a number of improvements to facilitate this over the past few weeks and we've temporarily disabled the explore functionality. Most of our customers display their maps on their own websites so the explore functionality was not getting much use regardless and it was the worst offender to any reliability issues we've been having so removing it shouldn't affect people too much and should help provide very fast and reliable service going forward.

Remember Me

2008-01-14T14:12:00.000-08:00

We've been so caught up in development for Wedding Mapper that we haven't been able to give CommunityWalk much attention over the last few months. So we just wanted to write to let people know that we are still going and are making sure that CommunityWalk is as stable and reliable as possible.

We also finally got around to adding in a "Remember Me" feature that will make it so that you don't have to log in to the site every time you visit. This has been the most request for some time so we hope it will make up for some of the recent neglect.

Server Migration Complete

2007-10-22T22:26:00.000-07:00

Ok, I think we are out of the thick of it. We've migrated the servers, put out more than one fire, and managed to maintain all data through out. We were worried that some data had been corrupted, but we were able to restore it with out problem.

From here on out we should be able to scale without issue. Hopefully :)

Server Migration Issues

2007-10-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

We've found an issue with our migration that took place last night. Some of the data that was imported was corrupted during the import. We need to reimport the data. This means that we will likely lose all information that was entered into the system this morning.

We are working on a way of restoring the information from this morning, but it does not look good right now. If we do lose this data then we will work with everyone affected to minimize the inconvenience this will cause.

Server Migration

2007-10-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

We are planning on migrating CommunityWalk's servers at noon today. Hopefully there will not be much downtime.

Upgrading Servers

2007-10-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

We are in the process of moving CommunityWalk to new servers where they can get more resources and hopefully provide a smoother and faster user experience. There might be some hiccups along the way so please bear with us.

In fact yesterday we had a problem with our email servers and email stopped coming through to the communitywalk.com domain. If you sent an email to us in the last 24 hours you'll need to send it again as we did not receive it. We are receiving email now, though, so it should be successful if you send it again.

Important Message

2007-09-17T10:08:00.000-07:00

We recently found a bug with our new embeddable maps that was preventing them from displaying properly on Safari. We've addressed the issue but it required changing the code snippet. So if you have a CommunityWalk map embedded on your website you'll need to get the latest code snippet from CommunityWalk and replace your existing code snippet.

Handling Growth

2007-08-23T14:43:00.000-07:00

Over the next few weeks we will be deploying CommunityWalk to a new hosting solution that we believe will give us the ability to grow indefinitely with minimal problems. Until this new solution is fully deployed and all the kinks are worked out there may be some downtime. We will do our very best to minimize this as much as possible.

Important News

2007-08-19T18:08:00.000-07:00

Important: To take advantage of this new functionality you will need to replace your current CommunityWalk code snippet with the one that is now on the CommunityWalk site.

Google Searches Redirect to Your Website

We've just released an enhancement that has significant ramifications for anyone who has a CommunityWalk map embedded in another website, especially professional maps.

Now, when you have a professional map embedded in your site, if someone does a search on Google for one of your map locations, CommunityWalk will redirect them to the page on your site where the map is displayed and will make that location display on the map.

We've embedded a sample professional map above. If you were to do a search in Google and one of the results was for a location on this map it would redirect your here and select that location on this map. Try it out with this search for the Turin Airport in Italy. Click on the first result and you'll be redirected back here with the airport selected on the map above.

Change How Your Map Displays with Different Links

Now you can also change the way your map displays without touching your code snippet. If you link to a page on your website that has a CommunityWalk map embedded on it (any version, professional or free, except the free blog version), you can include instructions for the CommunityWalk map in your url. A few examples are below. They will link back to this page with the map displaying something different.

Zoomed Out, Zoomed In, In Hybrid Mode

Reviews and Ratings

2007-08-17T14:54:00.000-07:00

A while back we introduced reviews and rating into Wedding Mapper, allowing people to rate and review the venues and vendors they used in their weddings.

We've been meaning to get this into CommunityWalk for anyone who might want to rate and review things on their map, but haven't had time to get around to it, until now.

So now you can find functionality for rating and reviewing locations when you edit a location on the 'Details' tab.

Check out this example of the rated and reviewed Westfield Mall in San Francisco.

Synced Up Tabs and Legend

2007-08-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

After releasing our latest functionality that allows you to hide categories by default, we received a few requests from people that this functionality be better synced up with the list of locations. After playing around with the list a bit we realized that it really should be completely synced up with the legend.

So now when you hide a category the location list collapses to hide that category as well. And when you collapse a category on the location list it hides that category in the legend.

This feels like a better solution, so we just want to say thanks to all the great users out there for pointing out this inconsistency and helping us make the product a little better.

Thank you!

Hide Categories by Default

2007-07-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

We've had a ton of requests for this one.

You can now, finally, hide categories by default. So if you want your map to start out with one out of the twenty categories on your map displayed, simply hide all the other categories and click "Save Default View". Every time you come back the categories will still be hidden.

You can also generate links to a view of your map with only certain categories displayed. Simply hide the categories that you want hidden and then click "Link to this map". The bottom link will have instructions in the link for hiding the categories.

So give a try. From all the requests we've received for this enhancement we hope this will be a nice little win for a lot of people.

Polygons and Categories for Paths

2007-06-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

We've been getting requests for the ability to create polygons on a map for sometime now and we were finally able to find the time to complete these requests.

So you can now create polygons on your map. Check out the example below. Just create a path and then click "Options" to find a "Is a Polygon" check box. Check that and you'll immediately see your path transformed into a polygon. It's pretty cool!

Just as we were about to release this we got a request for categories on paths, so we decided to slip that in as well. Now you can categorize paths to let people know what kind of path it is or, for that matter, what kind of polygon it is!

Running Smoothly

2007-06-16T09:22:00.000-07:00

After some growth pains earlier in the year, we've managed to make enough improvements to stabilize the site. It's been running smoothly for about a month now with no hiccups. Now we can get back to working on a few enhancements for the site.

First up, "Search Nearby". It will allow you to search near any marker on a map to get driving directions to and from a location that was not placed on the map by the map creator.

A Goal to Give Back

2007-05-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

Many people don't realize that there is only one person behind CommunityWalk and Wedding Mapper. I do all the development, support, maintenance, etc. I've had help along the way from consultants and designers, but for a while now I've been handling everything myself.

This is not an easy job, and with CommunityWalk's growth it has been difficult for me to stay ahead of the scalability curve. So I have been unable to fulfill one of my goals with CommunityWalk: to open CommunityWalk up to educators and non-profits for free, professional use (without ads).

So I want to make this goal public. As soon as I can stabilize the site, making it easily scalable, and as soon as I can afford to hire some help to deal with support and further development of the site then I will open it up for educators and non-profits for free use.

So please help me get the site to this point. Spread the word about CommunityWalk to realtors, local business bureaus, etc. that will be able to make use of the professional version of the site. And please tell everyone you know that is getting married about Wedding Mapper!

Slowness on the Site

2007-05-11T09:46:00.000-07:00

We've been seeing significant, unexpected traffic coming from a few different sources over the last few days and, unfortunately, the site is not equipped to handle such a spike in traffic right now. So many people may be experiencing slowness on the site right now. We expect this to last for the next day or so.

We've been aware that this might occur for some time now and have been preparing for it. Unfortunately it looks like our preparations were not implemented quite in time. I hope that we will be able to stabilize the site and equip it to handle such traffic spikes in the coming weeks, but it may be a bit further out than that.

In the meantime please accept my apologies for any slowness you encounter. It is our absolute highest priority to deal with it as soon as possible.

A Tab for Paths

2007-04-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

For the longest time now if you had a path the only way to select it was to click on it. We've finally created a tab for paths that lists out all of the paths on a map, allows you to show and hide them, and displays distances.

We had lots of ideas around how to implement this tab, but, in the end, we just decided to do the simplest thing possible. So it's nothing to exciting, but it is very useful from a practical standpoint.

You can see an example of this here (you need to click "Paths" to get the paths tab):

A Saturday Walk Around San Francisco

To add a "Paths" tab to your map click on "Advanced" under "Edit Settings" and select paths from one of the drop-downs.

New Ad Space

2007-03-26T22:37:00.000-07:00

We are playing around with the ads a little bit to see if we can't achieve significantly better click-through rates with a few tweaks. We've moved the ads up on the screen just a bit. I realize that this might be a little controversial. If this does not significantly improve click-through rates then we'll move it back down to the bottom.

Copy Maps with Glee

2007-03-15T16:38:00.000-07:00

You can now copy any map you have. Just click copy from your "My Maps" page. It will create an exact duplicate with all locations, photos, paths, comments, etc.

We've gotten a lot of requests for this one, especially since you can not yet bulk import path information. I know this is not a complete solution for the lack of path support when bulk importing, but at least now you can duplicate a path.

UK Bulk Import

2007-03-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

This one has been a while coming, so my apologies to all those "across the pond". You can now, finally, bulk import your data using addresses in the UK!

Reorder Categories at Will

2007-03-05T16:34:00.000-08:00

We've just released an enhancement that will allow you to reorder your categories to be in the order you want. This has been requested for quite a while so I hope people find it useful.

To reorder your categories simply edit your map's settings, click on "Categories" and drag them into the order you want!