Dear all,

At places.ae we would like to wish all our users and friends a happy new year coming up. We hope that 2010 brings you health and success, and as our commitment towards you all, is that we’ll give you more fun features, and more places.

Have a great year ahead,
The Places.ae

Dear all,
We had an unexpected downtime last night, whereby our Apache daemon didn’t wanted to get up again. Guess it must be the aftermath of the festivities.

Anyway it went down at 6AM GMT, and backup at 9AM GMT today, we’ll be monitoring if everything is ok and try to identify what happened.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused.

Michael

Dear all,
We would like to wish you a merry Christmas for you and your family.

Thank you,
Michael

Hi all,

Ho ho ho, Christmas is coming early this year. After several customer requests, and some internal code changes, you can now view the menus and brochures of places that are on places.ae.

When seeing the search results, you will notice a new icon next to some of the places, such as next to Breakfast to breakfast in the screen shot below:

This icon means that there’s a menu available for that place.

Of course we don’t have all menus and brochures yet. If you have one, please feel free to send it to menu@places.ae. Currently we want this manual step in between to avoid mis-use and abuse of these functions. While we do appreciate clear scans of the menu, please keep in mind that we have a 10 MB file size limit, and we’d like to get them in JPG’s please. Soon you’ll be able to upload them.

If you have any suggestions, questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us.

Thank you,
Michael

Our team at places.ae would like to wish a happy Eid al-Adha to all moslims.

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 to make the site prettier on several screen sizes, not only the enormous resolutions.

Also, the top logo and menu bar have changed. We ditches the MacOS-reflecting fonts, and the gradient background. This is more inline with the new marketing material we’ll be getting in.

In the background, we load a larger keyword list via lazy loading, so if you wait a tenth of a second after your page is loaded you’ll have more keywords in your autocomplete.

Thanks,
Michael

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 visual point, but some that you might not notice immediately are:

• We have a thickbox / lightbox / colorbox, however you wanna call it (try adding a phone number when logged in, and you’ll see what we mean)
• Phone numbers are now: +971 X YYY ZZZZ, instead of +971XYYYZZZ. (The spaces make it more readable)
• Fatter and better working auto complete on the home screen
• Tags are now displayed per popularity, so there’s a bit of consistency there
• Burj Dubai is on the front page now

Behind the scenes, following things were done:

• JQuery: the entire site is now in JQuery, yay.
• JQuery is served from google’s API hosts, so chances are big that you have it in your cache. (Saves you a whopping 55kB)
• We serve images of a different host now, to increase the performance
• We server CSS from another host also. (which got reduced to only one single file now, and it gets cached for ages)
• We serve now RSS for search results, you can see an example here.

So, we’re still finetuning the new layout, to come up with more AJAX goodness, increasing performance and ironing out some bugs. If you come across any bug, or would like to have something different, please let us know on webmaster@places.ae.

Thank you,
Michael

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, and removed these. We have some hiccups with this, but it’s all ironed out. (this all happened a 15 minutes ago, which is 9AM UAE time).

Anyway, all is sorted, thank you for using places.ae. When I am back, we’ll finalize the new layout, and push this.

Now I’m going to find my Zen again.

Thanks,
Michael

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.

We were notified by a friend of one of the guys, that the mobile site was giving problems on his Nokia device. This should all be fixed with taking the mobile site redirection load away from Rails, and let Apache rewrites deal with it.

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