New places.ae features, call it 3.1

Dear all,

It took a while, but we upgraded places.ae’s features again. Several users asked for some of these, and we thank you all for your feedback. If we’d add “versioning” to places.ae, then this would be version 3.1, seeing the 3 big layout and code rewrites we had before, then this. (The layout will be improved soon, the graphic’s guy is on holiday )

Features wise, here we go:

1. Addthis toolbar:
Share your favorite places on twitter, facebook, digg or a number of other social bookmarking services.

2. Avatars for registered users:
If you have an account on places.ae (which doesn’t have the activation email anymore), you can add an avatar of your choice, as long as it’s a JPG and 60 x 60 pixels, to make the site a bit more personal and human. The “mh” user is me, and that’s my signature intriguing look.

3. Edit your profile, properly:
In addition of the profile picture that can be changed (#2), you can add your own website as well as your twitter account. We;re trying some cool features with Twitter, so you can only benefit from it. We’re working on facebook connect, but it gave some errors so it wasn’t included in this release. Also, you can change your login to your real name, which will be displayed on comment posts.

4. Email comments:
If you want, you will be sent an email when a new comment is posted. Some users ask questions, and will have to check again if somebody answered. We made it easier for you, you’ll be notified when this happens.

5. Thumbs in place listings:
When looking through a list of results, it will include already if other liked it or now with our “thumbs up/thumbs down” system. You won’t risk calling a place that others don’t really like.

6. No more activation email when signing up:
When you sign up to places.ae, there’s no more “activation” email for you to click on. Yes, it verifies your email address, but we decided to leave it out. This makes it easier to sign up.

Aside from these visible things, we did a few things in the backend:

• We upgraded passenger (yes, we are still on Ruby on Rails)
• Upgraded to rails 2.3.3
• Included some manual caching procedures, which will decrease our MySQL server load significantly

As said on twitter, we’re ironing out some issues, and then we’ll be good to go.

Keep those suggestions for improvement. We’re just trying to be better, or at least we’re trying to suck less.

Thank you,
Michael