Dear all,

It seems that the Google Maps API is broken, and some places could show up without any maps. We can’t do anything about it, but please wait until Google fixes this (which I’m sure they’ll do very soon).

Thank you,
Michael

The places.ae team wish you a happy ramadan to all Muslims around the world.

Quick one, now you can use facebook to login to places.ae. This way, you don’t have to create another set of credentials.

Hi all,
We updated the comments engine. With following changes:

• if there’s a large number of comments, these will be hidden from the initial view.
• the order of comments is reversed, the latest comments are now on top
• No more anonymity, you can set your name even when not logged in so it won’t show “anonymous” for all comments anymore
• The captcha is easier to read

We had have great brainstorming sessions and you can look forward to interesting changes in places.ae in the next few weeks. In the meantime, hope you like the new way of commenting.

Thank you,
Michael

You shouldn’t have noticed a thing (aside from a very embarrassing HTTP/500 Error that came up for a few seconds), but we migrated the site to a new source code versioning system.

All is up and running, smoothly!

Dear all,
We had some hiccups with the apache configuration a few days ago whereby all traffic was routed to blog.places.ae instead of the main site. Furthermore, we had some issues on our Ruby on Rails app whereby the search results sometimes resulted in an HTTP/500 Error.

But that’s all fixed now, sorry for the inconvenience.

Thank you,
Michael

Dear all,

We attended the new, DIC organized DemoCamp Dubai yesterday, it was different, but good nevertheless. Sad thing though is that the demo’s took longer than foreseen (each were given 10 minutes), but I did the same 2 years ago when I presented places.ae on Democamp 1.

Anyhow, I’d suggest for the organizers to actually have a public counting-down clock on stage, so presenters are forced to use their timeslots, and not longer. Also, initially, the rule was that you demo your app, not a powerpoint slide about what it will be, or could do.

As said, it was different, and change is inevitable, it was a good event. Good to see all startup familiar faces again.

Take care,
Michael

Ni Hao!
Happy New Year to our Chinese friends, Chinese users and their Chinese friends. That the year of the tiger may bring you luck, a good health and answers to any questions you have.

Check out the several chinese restaurants in Dubai.

Warm regards,

Michael

Hi all,

Sorry for the delays in blogging, but I was practicing for my 10k marathon run. I’ve been practicing the past, say, 2 months and didn’t have much time to push new changes to places.ae. Anyhow, we’ve been drafting new features on papers, have potential very interesting partnerships coming up, so now we’re back in full effect.

Thank you,
Michael

Today, two years ago, places.ae went from a “coming soon” page to the real deal. The application was, and is, far from finished, and I remember that the fromtpage was a whopping 450+ kB page.

It was a nice and exciting thing, as this was the first rails application we ever put on the Internet. And have continued to learn a lot since then.

Hits increased, servers got upgraded and the UI had three major changes (so far), and we still have a long way to go and many fun things coming up.

Thank you for using places.ae, signing up, supporting us, giving us valuable comments and criticism, we couldn’t have done this without you, our valuable users.

Take care,
Michael