Everything in Between

Some more minor updates. First off I added a First and Last button to the page controls under the search listings. I think this will help make page navigation a little easier. Next, I changed the controls under the photos to similar numbered controls, to make it more obvious that there is more than one picture. Also, if you click on the picture you will be brought to the listing.

You will now notice that the first listing will always be loaded into the quickview, so the quickview should never be empty. For those new to the site the quickview is the viewer on the right side of the main search page.

The logo has also been updated. We added a 'TM' next to the tiki guy and made the word BETA smaller. Thank you so much Kara for all your hard work on this. And to Ben for creating the original logo.

More to come, we are really starting to kick off marketing tikiwade. In fact, there is an article on tikiwade in the classifieds section of the latest Midwest Mopars newsletter. I am so excited. This newsletter goes out to around 500 club members, myself included because I am a member! Thank you Marigale! And Midwest Mopars!

If you would like to learn more about Midwest Mopars you can go to the clubs web site at http://www.midwestmopars.com

Feed your RSS

This weekend I was able to update a few things and make a few changes based on user feedback. The first is that the pagination controls on the bottom of the search results now work properly. Now that we have more than 10 pages of listings I was able to find and fix that bug, thank you to everyone for all the listings!!!

RSS Feeds are now live and working. The system will go through every 10 minutes and update the RSS Feed for all listing types (Items, Real Estate, Jobs, and Services) So you can just select the RSS button in the upper left hand corner of the search results to subscribe to the feed. Note however that the feed os of all listings, it does not just show a feed based on your search results, at least not yet.

We changed some wording, you now need to select the "Post To Classifieds" link to log in, on that page is a sign up page if you do not have an account. There are some more changes in this area that I won't mention here, but you may notice.

Please keep adding listings, we really appreciate it.

Midweek update

I know, I usually only post update on the weekend but I wanted to get this out now. I added a new feature to tikiwade that should bring in more outside eyes to all the listings that we are creating. It will allow the google search engine to see the actual listings that you create, and should hopefully increase exposure of these listings.

What this means to you!!! You need to try to be very descriptive words in your listings, words that will match what other people might type into a search engine when looking for what you are creating a listing for.

Oh, and as a result, there is a background processing feature that is also up and running that will expire your listings and send you an email when they do expire. I'll continue to add features to this.

Just for U and I

A couple small UI changes that you may not even notice without me telling you about them. First off, when you put your mouse over the search results you will notice that the quickview (the view on the right side) will instantly (high speed internet) get updated with the larger photo and detail. Also, If you just click on the item in the list you will be taken to the page with the full details.

If you are unfotunate enought to be using IE 6 you will notice the 2 main logos in the header will no longer have that grayish background.

There is some other work that I did that you won't see. I added some UI to our reporting so that we can see some of the usage information within the tikiwade server, and I added some more to the rating system, which is adding the ability for users to rate other users. This will be coming soon.

tweet tweet

You can now follow me on twitter!!

Can you say 'Analytics'?

I added code that is now collecting more data on tikiwade site usage that we will use to monitor the growth and usage of the site. Data mining of this sort is often referred to as analytics as it is used to build a profile of a web site and to try to determine what draws users to a particular page or part of a web site. We will be using this data to monitor the sites growth and usage. I am also collecting search terms that we will use to see how people search and what they are searching for on tikiwade.

I loosened up the character checking for listing titles.If you are a geek like me you can now enter HTML in this field when creating listings, but more importantly you can enter in non alphanumeric characters. A few more categories have been added, again please drop me an email at wade@tikiwade.com if you feel a specific category should be added. I also created and added 2 new default photos, the ever popular "No photo Available" photo and the ""Photo Coming Soon" photo. Please email any photo ideas that you may have to me as well, I will review them and add them if I like them :-)

I also found a fun little bug it in the search code that took a while to track down. It was a misplaced parenthesis that was causing quite a problem as it was preventing searches from working properly, but searches still ran without any errors...FUN!

We continue to see listings being added to the site. This is great, please keep adding stuff and help us all to make tikiwade successful.

Wade