Archive for November, 2008
November 30th, 2008. Filled in Features.
We have been tracking failed searches in Wolpy for some time now and we’ve realized that a high percentage of them was due to spelling errors.
For example, altough we accept and recognize places’ names in several languages, cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen or Nuremberg have a tricky spelling, difficult to remember.
Since it’s pretty frustrating trying to add a place to your map but not remembering the right spelling of it, we have implemented a “did you mean” feature that given a misspelled place offers a right alternative (like in Google’s search results).
From now on if you try to add Madrd or Moscouw to your map we’ll know what you mean! :)
Note to geeks
Unfortunately Geonames, the web service we are using for searching World places, doesn’t have a “did you mean” feature implemented, so we have use Google Maps API for it. Here is a tutorial by Mike Williams that explains how to do it.
November 25th, 2008. Filled in Features, Versions.
Yeah! We have just launched some big updates today. The main one is that now you can associate trips to your visited places, and save the date, photos and travel experiences of each one.
We have redesigned the list of your visited places so you can add trips to each place easily.
Note that you may find some bugs this week until we tune everything properly.
November 20th, 2008. Filled in Features.
If you use Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7 (or any newer version) you can add our place search to your browser!
Just click on the tap next to your browser search box (or ctrl + k for Windows, ⌘+k for Mac) and add Wolpy as a search engine, so you can use it each time you want to look for place reviews (and soon… trips!)
November 19th, 2008. Filled in Places.
First and second most visited cities of a country are usually well known. But do you know which is the third most visited city in Spain? and in USA? in China?
We’ve made some queries to see which are the third most visited cities of a few countries, according to our users’ data. We still don’t have enough users to make relevant stats but even so the results are very interesting :)
One of the more unexpected third position is Sintra, a small town near Lisbon. It’s in fact a very touristic place, but it’s incredible that it’s the third most visited place of Portugal!
Here there’s the list of third most visited places of some countries:
Argentina: Córdoba (41) – after Buenos Aires (150) and San Carlos de Bariloche (46)
Australia: Brisbane (30) – after Sydney (81) and Melbourne (39)
China: Hangzhou (75) – after Beijing (163) and Shanghai (131)
Germany: Frankfurt (152) – after Berlin (317) and Munich (226)
Italy: Florence (357) – after Rome (533) and Venice (415)
Japan: Osaka (42) – after Tokyo (97) and Kyoto (56)
Mexico: Playa del Carmen (42) Рafter Mexico City (115) and Canc̼n (106)
Portugal: Sintra (84) – after Lisbon (395) and Porto (155)
Spain: Seville (401) – after Madrid (719) and Barcelona (707)
Sweden: Gothenburg (36) – after Stockholm (163) and Malmö (59)
Switzerland: Berne (76) – after Geneve (145) and Zurich (136)
United Kingdom: Oxford (95) – after London (691) and Edinburgh (167)
US: Los Angeles (195) – after New York (420) and San Francisco (209)
November 8th, 2008. Filled in Ideas, Places.
This provocative quote is from Harry Shearer, the actor who is behind the voices of a lot of The Simpsons characters (Ned Flanders, Seymour Skinner, Mr. Burns…). In fact it is a compliment to his favourite city, New Orleans.
The saving grace of New Orleans is its poverty. There’s never been enough money in New Orleans to destroy either the architecture or the music scene. People don’t play music in New Orleans for the reasons they do in Nashville or LA – to become stars or to get rich – they play because they’ve got to.
It certainly sound like a great place to visit and listen to some good jazz!
Harry has said that in an interview for one of my favourite series of the Guardian’s Travel section: Me and my travels, where famous people are asked interesting questions about their travels, favourite cities and memorable trip stories.
In fact, I like so much these interviews, that I was thinking on adding similar personal questions about general travel experiences in Wolpy profiles. It would be like having your own interview in your profile.
I was even thinking on adopting the “I only can see the amount of information that I’m willing to share” game that our friends of Tagueame added to their application (you only can read others people’s answers if you also answer some of the questions). It can be fun and can motivate people to share their experiences :)
November 3rd, 2008. Filled in Inside.
Wolpy has been running pretty well in a server with only 256 MB of RAM during its first months of life, but we have been experiencing some downtimes lately due to traffic growth so we’re going to migrate to a bigger server tonight.
We will start the migration at around 5:00 GMT and the application would be inaccessible over the migration period (that we would try to make as short as possible). Sorry for the inconveniences!
