Dear,

Now, our iPhone, Android and Blackberry user can access the menu pages, as we published it on our mobile interface. Fill your stomache, wherever you are.

Thank you,
Michael

on http://www.places.ae/menus!

Hi hungry places.ae users,

After digitizing the menus we had on the previous version, we put a more user friendly and easier to navigate menus. Bon appetite!

Thank you,
Michael

Dear all,

We might have minimal domain problems in the next few minutes, as we are changing to a new email provider. In 99% of the time, you won’t notice a thing.

Thank you,
Michael

You know lunch’s approaching and you stomache’s telling you that it would appreciate some food. You’d be sad to know that we removed the old styled menu’s that we had on places.ae, but you’d be glad to know that we took it off to improve it.

Just look for the icon in your search results, and you’ll see it has a menu! Enjoy the new styled menu, easier to work with and order from.

Bon appetite!

Thank you,
Michael

Hi all,
Seems that we had some issues with captcha’s being cached.. This was giving “Error creating comments” errors.

This should be solved now!

Thanks,
Michael

Hi all,

We had a small change in the search engine, for a while we implemented Sphinx, but we noticed that some searches were returning complete different results. So, we put it back to the original homebrew search algorithm we had. We’re re-assessing and fine-tuning sphinx to give us better results, but at the moment, it’s not really suiting our needs.

Thanks,
Michael

After a mere 3 months of development, 1 month of usability and stress testing, we’re proud to announce the new and complete rewritten places.ae. It was a thorough rewrite, whereby we decided which code and functionality to keep, and which to throw away. The team sat together, outlined it all, developed, re-developed, and finally put it online.

So, what has changed?

- A new homepage: we bound the search function into one search box now. You can easily search for either “food“, or “food in jumeirah” or so. There’s no several boxes anymore.

- New mobile page: on www.places.ae/mobile, just cleaner and nicer. More iOS and Android friendlier. We know, the 90′s called and wanted their design back

- New Search: you won’t really see this visually, but in the backend we completely refactored the search. Instead of lining up places closest to a “virtual middle” of an area, we actually defined all areas now. Apart from that, we calculate a weight of popularity into a place. The more popular your place is in an area, the higher it will be in the search results.

- new menu’s: we have implemented new HTML menu’s. While we had good numbers on the previously scanned versions, we decided to have an HTML version. This helps us indexing it, making it searchable and comparable (hint), and makes it easer to copy paste.

- New servers: latest technology to have kick ass performance, hosted by our friends at serverbeach.com.

- Rails 3: we upgraded from 2.3.8 to the latest; 3.0.4. It’s kick ass, but required a big rewrite of old code though.

We’re actively monitoring the site’s performance to optimize server settings and cache parameters. So, the site might have a few hiccups as we go along the next few days.

We are currently migrating the latest comments and users, so we might have a bit of inconsistencies, please bear with us for a few hours and all should be good to go.

We hope you like it, if you have any questions or remarks, you can always contact us on http://www.places.ae/contact or webmaster@places.ae.

Thank you for being part of this,
Michael

Dear all,

10 January, 2008, exactly 3 years ago today, we pushed the first version of places.ae onto the Internet, and then went for a beer. Many changes since then, and still more changes to come. I was actually hoping we’d be finished with the development of the completely revamped version, done testing and be able to push it today. But, just hang in there, and we promise it will be worth it.

In the meantime, I would like to thank the team (J, L and D) for all their hard work, and to our visitors to point us out the mistakes we do, and to give suggestions.

Happy birthday places.ae!

Thank you,
Michael

Dear all,
Quick note to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2011 coming up. We’re a few days late, but were travelling in South Asia.

Thanks,
Michael

Dear all,

‘T is the season to be jolly.

It’s that time of the year again; Santa Claus, chrismas carols, times for new year resolutions and lot of attempts to stop smoking and lose a few pounds. This year, 50% of places.ae’s workforce will be going to do charity work with PEPY in Cambodia over the holiday season. (Some will even go again). It’s our attempt to do good to the world.

Henceforth, as I’m flying out tomorrow early morning, I would like to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous 2011 coming up.

At places.ae, we started a complete code rewrite of the site, being on Rails 3.0, and a revamped interface. While I was hoping to have this finished in early December, some data migration issues (damn Rails gems) delayed this, and we have to push this off till somewhere in January.

The new version (I guess, we could call it Places.ae 4.0) will have a completely new search engine, looking at more than just vicinity, be faster, and have more attributes to our places. We also have a secret sauce element, which we can’t tell you abaout of course.

Our traffic doubled in 2010, so it seems that we’re doing something right, and I would like to personally thank the entire places.ae team for this; You guys rock.

Happy holiday season,

Michael