Posted by Chris
Sat, 08 Jul 2006 15:57:00 GMT
A number of UK-based people have requested a pounds sterling option, so that they can guard against exchange rate fluctuations altering the amount of their monthly subscription.
Being as we’re in the UK this makes a lot of sense, so we’ve implemented this for you.
Current prices are £2.50 per month, or £24 pounds a year. These prices include VAT (UK sales tax), so if you are a UK VAT-registered business you can reclaim this amount and only pay just over £2 a month. Bargain.
pininthemap.com
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Tue, 04 Jul 2006 13:14:00 GMT
Our “checkname” function went on strike this morning, refusing to return decent error messages until given better working conditions.
We’ve beaten it into submission now. If you’ve tried to register a premium pin in the last day or so and not had much luck choosing your pin name, have another go now. Let us know of any other problems. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Mon, 03 Jul 2006 12:44:00 GMT
We’re calling it 2.0 because such a lot has gone in….
First up, premium pins are here. You can use PayPal to purchase either a monthly or an annual subscription to turn an individual pin “premium”.
This gives you a number of nice extras… It lets you embed your pin into your website without all the stuff around the page, you get a proper link with real words, linking to a neat view without any adverts on the main page. We’re sure you’ll like it.
Also, we’ve trotted out our designer, Dan, who’s given up a lovely new redesign with a neat logo and new colour scheme to brighten things up. Hope you like it.
Oh, and there’s now a handy little ‘digg this!’ link on the right hand side of the menu, just in case you haven’t yet :)
Enjoy. Any questions, let us know.
pininthemap.com
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Tue, 27 Jun 2006 12:40:00 GMT
Pin in the Map is a month old today!
So how has the service fared? What’s been going on recently?
31 days in and we’re averaging 4,000 pages a day, with over 11,000 pins created so far. Our high point of 43,000 pages was on the 6th June, when The Register ran a story on us and we made the Del.icio.us front page and their popular list.
We’ve also got onto digg (if you feel like digging us, click here) plus a number of other sites. For some reason, the coverage has been mostly in Japan. I’m not quite sure why.
What’s new? Well, we’ve been working hard on the Paypal integration for the Pin in the Map Premium service. It’s almost done; still to do is the automated selection of a premium name for your pin, and a few bits of tidying. You know what’ll happen, Google will release GBuy the moment we’re done, with a lower commission, and we’ll be sorely tempted to move to them (and redo the integration!) We want to get this running sooner rather than later so watch this space.
We’re also trying to fit in a revamp of the look. We’ll keep the lines, but we may well improve the logo and the color schema. Quite frankly, the current design isn’t really a design at all, and any improvement will only be a good thing.
Hope that fills you in sufficiently. Any questions, holler.
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Wed, 21 Jun 2006 13:15:00 GMT
A number of you have written in to say that your pins were moving a few yards in an annoying fashion after you put them down.
We thought this was annoying too; so we looked into the problem. It looks like the “float” column type in MySQL only saves about 6 or so significant digits; so any pins at the ‘edges of the earth’ (far extremes from 0,0) were only accurate to about 20 metres. Not good enough.
We’ve altered the database so that we store all the precision data now. Thanks to the new fancy editing capability, you are able to edit your pin position and place it exactly where you want it; it should stay put this time!
Any further problems in this area; let us know.
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:32:00 GMT
We’ve finished the pin editing capability. From now on, anyone who has entered a password for their pin will be able to edit the pin description, place the pin somewhere else, and change the map type.
It’s still officially in beta, so if anyone notices anything weird, then let us know.
If you have any other suggestions, then send ‘em in! We feel like we’re on a roll…
Next, we’re probably going to look at getting the whole premium thing up and running. Stay tuned.
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Mon, 19 Jun 2006 10:43:00 GMT
We’ve almost finished the pin editing capability.
This will give everyone a link on the bottom right of their pin, allowing them to do some nifty in place editing as long as they entered a pin password. You’ll also be able to change the place placement and tweak the zoom and map type.
A nice side effect of this is that you can see the “source text” for any pin (although you won’t be able to change it unless you know the password). So if you see a pin you really like the look of, and want to know how it was created, you can click ‘edit pin’ and find out…
This new feature will be released sometime in the next few days. You might want to subscribe to our blog feed so that you don’t miss it when it comes out…
-Chris
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:41:00 GMT
In roughly this order…
- New groovy geocoding routines that Google have just made available
- Editing of pins
- Multiple pins
- Premium pins
Got a feature you want to see? let us know!
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Wed, 14 Jun 2006 20:30:00 GMT
A lot of people have been asking us when we’ll make the “premium pins” available on Pin in the Map.
Well, we hit a snag. We’ve noticed on the web that various adverts have started appearing for sponsored links on Google’s map site.
What we don’t want to do is sell a “no adverts” product, and then have Google come along and plaster adverts over it without us being able to do anything about it.
We contacted Google about this a little while ago, but no response has emerged from the Googleplex just yet.
We may just go ahead and release a product anyway, with a big disclaimer on the adverts thing. We’re thinking of doing a monthly payment option in any case, so that people who care about this can simply cancel and will only have lost a very small amount of cash (premium pins are likely to be a very small amount per month).
If you’re interested in the whole premium pin thing, check out this page and send us your email address so that we can let you know of updates.
Posted in pin in the map
Posted by Chris
Mon, 12 Jun 2006 20:02:00 GMT
So we’ve done the theme. It looks pretty much like our website’s going to look when it’s done.
We’ve stretched our designers nice clean site look to make this work. Hope he likes it… It’ll be obvious if he doesn’t, as this page design will changed markedly for the better…
Posted in meta
