Milestone: 50 Accounts

This week marks a milestone in the history of SoarPort: Our 50th user account. Soon we will also note another significant milestone: our 100th SoarPort. Look for that to occur in the next 30 days!

Small tools update

I've added some small updates to the site. Now you can add the latest SoarPort feeds to your iGoogle account, accessible in the tools section on the main page. Also, there is an Alexa rank image. This is experiemental. We'll see how this goes, if there is any discernable benefit to including this. Finally, some plumbing changes: meta tags are out, and opensearchdescription.xml is in. This was done to improve search results, and we'll have to wait and see if there is a benefit to doing this.

An open letter to Homeplans.com

I recently went to Homeplans.com. If ever there was a site that was a match made in heaven for SoarPort, its Homeplans.com. Homeplans.com (as you might guess) sells floorplans for home construction. Here is an example of their work:



Now, here is how they currently show floorplans:



Here is my suggestion:



The advantage is that customers can see the full floorplan within the existing page - there is no need to open a new window to see the full sized floorplan.

I'd like to see SoarPort used at Homeplans.com. It really is an excellent fit.

Changes have begun

Relative to the items in the last SoarPort blog post, changes have taken place. I've used a number of resources to help accomplish this much, and one of the key things to keep in mind is, this type of change doesn't end. Consider this resource: 10GoldenRules.com. This site offers - as you might guess - 10 "Golden Rules" on how to market your site. I won't give away all 10 rules, after all, they have an easy to download podcast for that. But I will talk about 1 rule which is featured prominently: testing. Because it is so cheap to test on the internet, they recommend test, test, test, until you get a result you like. Excellent advice. Look for more testing in the weeks ahead.

Look for changes

I recently received some excellent feedback on SoarPort. From the list, the changes that will occur on SoarPort in the next month will include:

1. Entry page improvements: "there's
nothing on the first page that tells me what the actual purpose is"
2. Sign up page improvements: "There's nothing there that tells me why I would want to be a member, and
how being a member would benefit me"
3. Explanation of system requirements: "I couldn't see anything useful until I enabled scripts. " I've never run the site without scripts, so I will have to see what can be done technically to over come this. If this cannot be dealt with technically, then a note must appear to instruct the user to enable their javascript.
4. Fewer ads (if any) "It appears that the
purpose of the site is to sell Google Ads". There is a place for advertising, but not in the areas where it was previously placed. I will explore different options for advertising.
5. More Zoom levels "Once I did enable scripts all I saw was an image viewer that has very
limited zoom capabilities. " Fewer zoom levels was part of the proof of concept, where when testing I wanted to get the image in place quickly. I can change the zoom levels to 10, and eventually look at increasing that number as well. Recent technical improvements to how tiles are created has made the footprint of a stored image not a problem for more zoom levels.

I have begun to work on these changes already, and will roll out a fix to address each of these issues by June 1, 2008. There may be more refinement required after that point, but there will be an effort made to address each of these items by that time.

Free 10MB Image Uploads

Geez, I almost forgot: the size limit for individual uploads is now (virtually) gone. I was able to make some image processing improvements, which meant that I could save something like 90% of the disk space the original beta took up when creating tiles. So a 10MB image file now has a much smaller footprint. Enjoy.

Patterns of imagery

It would certainly seem that in the early going SoarPort members are uploading photography. I've made some modifications to help ensure that works as expected. It is a funny thing, given the opportunity to "soar", you do tend to do more analysis of photos. For example, consider this image of 2 parrots:



The white and grey bird has some weird reflective glob on his beak. At first, I thought it was his eye, but via the zoom capabilities in SoarPort, I got right in there an found it was light reflecting off his somewhat shiny beak.