Tagzania Blog

There was something we hidden when we renewed Tagzania, route distances. The information was in our database but it wasn’t shown. Now you can see this information below the map, have a look at this image of the Donostia beach walk:

You can choose how you want to see the distance, kilometers or miles. This can be selected in the user’s preferences page.

Distances are back in Tagzania because you asked for it, this time through UserVoice’s feedback app.

Go on telling us what you need!

As you might have noticed, we’ve done some changes in Tagzania.

• We are using UserVoice’s Feedback application. You can see it in the left part of every page in Tagzania. We want to enable new ways of getting users feedback and UserVoice’s tool looks great for that. If you click on the Feedback button, you can see other users suggestions or submit your own ideas about Tagzania, you can also report any bug you found.

• See all your tags: some weeks ago we developed a tag suggestion feature to help those who are adding a place in Tagzania and don’t remember which tags they used before. But some users gave us some feedback about the tag suggestion so we decided to insert a button to see all your tags during the process. Have a look to the “See all your tags”option, and then what happens after clicking on it.

• Download all your places without limits: this is another user request. Some of you have a lot of places added in Tagzania. Whenever youaa wanted to download the KML with your places, there was a limit of 200 points. Now you can download a KML with all your points, whithout any limits, on your user page (i.e. www.tagzania.com/user/your_user_name), next to the “Edit preferences” button.

• Contact us and permalink links are another change we’ve done. If you click on the first one, you can send us a message about something you’ve noticed on a certain place (wrong info, wrong place, …).

This changes have been done thinking on users, hope we’re right and you enjoy them.

Some weeks ago we launched a survey to know what do you think about Tagzania. Our idea is finding ways of improving our service.

One of the things we’ve just developed is the tag suggestion. Every time you add a new place you have to add some tags. If you’re a hard user and you’ve got a lot of tags, it’s not easy remembering them. With this tag suggestion feature, you just need to type three characters and we’ll show you the tags you’ve already used with those characters.

In these example you can see how I’ve just typed “tok” and Tagzania suggests me “tokyo“.

These days we’re doing some research work to discover your feelings about Tagzania. We’d like to know what do you think about our new version and which improvements should we develop. In fact, we’ve got two different surveys, one for our active users and another one for the visitors (like people coming from search engines).

This morning we sent an email to our users so that they can answer some questions in this survey.

We’ve also added some text and a link in Tagzania to the visitors survey.

We’d really appreciate if you could take a minute to help us improving Tagzania

Trying to cleanup the site, we decided to remove drastically and then start adding elements to the page. So we removed latitude and longitude data for the regular view (and Microformats, as the lines of code worked for both of them).

Now after so many of you requesting the coordinates, we have decided to show them again. Of course, Microformats are active too. Thanks for your feedback and enjoy!

About microformats

If you want to learn about microformats, take a look at these links:

• Microformat Wikipedia article
• Microformats.org
• Operator plugin for Firefox

Yes, that’s right. We want to know what’s your opinion about the new Tagzania.

Some of you have already done it by posting a comment in this blog (thanks Rhys!), using the mailing list (like Mkk or Jason) or writing us an email to tagzania (at) gmail.com (like our IPY friends and Matteo have done).

That’s the only way of improving Tagzania, knowing your thoughts on the new version.

Thanks a lot!

As soon as the migration finished, we launched new Tagzania. These are some interesting points:

• This new version has been written using Django.
• New design. We have worked with La Personnalite, a Basque design firm.
• At the moment, we just have three languages (English, Spanish and Basque). We’ll add soon new languages, at least the same languages we had in the previous version. We’d like to apologize for any inconvenience caused to our users.
• Less is more. Our goal was cleaning Tagzania. We’ve tried hard to design clear user experiences and have useful features for our users, like Panoramio’s photos or multiple icons.

This has been an important step for us, but it’s just the first one. We’re fixing bugs and improving this new Tagzania.

Hope we’ll have your collaboration.

By the way, what do you think about new Tagzania?

Dear friends,

You may have noticed that you can’t add any new point. We are migrating to the new Tagzania. This process will finish soon.

After showing our logo, is time to show Tagzania´s new look:

What do you think?

Dear friends,

If everything goes well, we’ll launch new Tagzania version next week. This is the our new logo:

It has been a long way since we started preparing this new version. But don’t expect new features. The biggest change is inside the application, in the code. We have rewritten Tagzania in Django.

As you can imagine, Tagzania will also change how it looks like.

You’ll have more news next week.