Dear all, We pushed a new update with some minor changes, mainly to cater smaller screens. I have dual 20 inch monitors, and am using a rather large resolution. Machines that use a smaller resolution, say 1024×786, were scrolling most of the time, looking at huge fonts on their screen. This has been changed, now [...]

We mentioned it a month and a half ago, we were going to overhaul the layout of places.ae. Well, this is it. No, it didn’t change much in terms of “visuals”.. the grey background became white, and we also ditched the round corners. since they are so 2008 Few more things that happened from a [...]

Ni hao, While being on a Zen-finding holiday, I didn’t have much access to the Internet. When I arrived back in Beijing this morning, and synced my Blackberry, i noticed that a few dozen places were created all about Escorts in Dubai. Though we appreciate the creation of places, we noticed that these were spam, [...]

Hi all, Users who access places.ae over a mobile device should be redirected (most Handheld devices, not all yet) to the mobile site. While being visually less appealing, you’ll be grabbing only 3kB instead of 36kB’s, which is a lot faster. In a country where 3G is not where it should be, it surely helps. [...]

Hi all, You might have noticed, some of the comments posted on places promote products for credit cards and hair thinner products. Obviously these are spam messages, and we are taking care of them. We adjusted the spamfilter and are testing for false positives and negatives. Thanks, Michael

Dear all, Due to doing some testing with the new location engine in places.ae, we used “Bur Juman Mall” (link) as a test bed, and with some malfunctioning less-optimized SQL queries, we made the mall disappear. We are notified when a huge amount of 404′s are thrown, and all URL’s that were looking for places [...]

This upcoming Eid holidays, Dhana, a good friend with an awesome wealth of SQL knowledge (she helps out with the SQL queries in places.ae) will be going to Cambodia, to build a school for the local population. She doesn’t do this on every trip, it’s for a good cause. Organized by Pepy tours, places.ae will [...]

Dear all, From all the people who helped with places.ae, we wish you a blessed Ramadan. To visit new mosques you haven’t been to in dubai, please find them here: http://www.places.ae/find/mosque/in/dubai. Thank you, Michael

We noticed that some URL’s had different formats, for example: www.places.ae/show/123-mike’s-pizza-joint www.places.ae/show/123-mike’s_pizza_joint www.places.ae/show/123_mike’s_pizza_joint www.places.ae/show/123_mikes-pizza-joint That’s all stream lined now to all hyphens (first example), SEO better and uniform. It also allows us more insight in our backend analytics how many hits a certain page got. Thanks, Michael

Web bots (crawlers) seems to click all they see… Another point in the todo list. This list now exist of: – Making places Rails 2.3.3 compatible – Optimizing frontend (and keep new design ready) – Adding more features for notifications – Optimizing search engine – Finally adding avatars for users, and include Facebook connect – [...]