GoRoam - Blog

Twitter stream

2009-04-14T08:06:00.002-04:00

Well we've now succumbed to the growing tidal wave that is Twitter. We're planning on posting minor site updates and some general day-to-day comments, but not a crazy ton of stuff. Feel free to follow us at: http://twitter.com/go_roam. Tweet, tweet!

wikiHow and eHow Articles

2009-04-09T08:28:00.002-04:00

We just added How-to articles on wikiHow (http://www.wikihow.com/Add-Google-Maps-to-Your-Website-or-Blog) and eHow (http://www.ehow.com/how_4900224_add-interactive-google-map-blog.html). Check them out and tell us what you think.

Tumblr Tutorial

2009-04-02T08:49:00.002-04:00

We've finished a new tutorial for the GoRoam Geomapper: our Tumblr tutorial. If you have a blog on Tumblr, our step-by-step tutorial should help you get a fully-functional Google Map on your blog in no time.

If you don't use Tumblr, refer to our our Blogger tutorial or the general Geomapper How-To Tutorial. And be sure to check back here as we add tutorials for other websites and blogging platforms.

Blogger Tutorial

2009-04-01T08:06:00.003-04:00

We've finished our first tutorial for the GoRoam Geomapper: our Blogger tutorial. If you have a blog on Blogger, our step-by-step tutorial should help you get a fully-functional Google Map on your blog in no time.

We've also added a tutorial for the Latitude/Longitude Search page, so check it out if you're having trouble finding the lat/lng for your tags.

If you don't use Blogger, don't worry. You can still use the general Geomapper How-To Tutorial. And be sure to check back here as we add tutorials for other websites and blogging platforms.

GoRoam Geomapper

2009-03-27T20:39:00.003-04:00

Mapping enthusiasts: We're excited to announce a completely new application that we think you'll love. We're calling it the GoRoam Geomapper. It makes it as easy as possible for you to add maps to your web pages in just a few easy steps. We've also added an extended help site, so check it out if you need any help with the Geomapper.

Over the course of the next couple weeks, we're planning on adding a bunch of tutorials for your sites if they're hosted in various websites or blogging platforms, so check back often. As always, there's still the original GoRoam application, but we think you'll really find the Geomapper useful. Feel free to email us at support@goro.am with any problems.

Now go out there and start geomapping!

Simple Geomapping Example

2009-03-24T06:56:00.009-04:00

Here is a simple example of how to use our new Geomapping application. Be sure to check out our full example page too.

Here is a photo of the Westwoods Trailhead, which in the fall is across the street from pick-your-own raspberry picking:

Hosting Move Complete

2008-10-24T07:00:00.004-04:00

Well I finished the move last night, but I had to wait for the changes to propogate through the internet. It looks like the changes have now taken effect, though it could take up to another 24 hours before they are seen everywhere. Thank you for your patience during this move. I think the site performs much better already.

Be on the lookout in the next 2-4 weeks for some new functionality.

Moving Hosts

2008-10-23T20:16:00.003-04:00

Tonight I'm going to begin (and hopefully end) the process of moving GoRoam off of its current hosting company and onto Amazon Web Services. While this is happening, the website will not be available and you should bounce to this blog page (which you probably already know if you're reading this). When the move is complete, I will remove the redirection and the site should work as it did before. I'll post back here again once the move is finished.

I'm really excited about this move, mostly because the current host is horribly slow. Not only should we see noticeable speed improvements with AWS, but we'll be embracing cloud computing. You don't need to understand the technical details of cloud computing, just that it should make it easier for us to grow the site as it becomes more popular. Plus, GoRoam will essentially be hosted in the same way that Amazon hosts its site, so the speed and consistency should be similar to theirs.

I know it's been a while since I've updated the site, but it has taken me a while to figure out AWS in order to complete this transition. That, and I recently got married and, let me tell you, weddings take a lot of work - work that I should have devoted instead to GoRoam, but what can you do? Now I'm back focusing on GoRoam so after I complete this hosting move, I hope to follow it up with new functionality.

Version 1.1

2008-07-01T23:23:00.003-04:00

Here's a small update to the site that fixes a problem I was having with the browser's cookies. With the previous version, I was writing temporary data (unsaved route information) to cookies on your machine. What I didn't realize was that cookies are limited to 4kb - about the file size of GoRoam's logo image. This is not very big, especially when saving a large route. So now I'm saving that temporary data back to the server, which slows the page loading a little bit (since the current webserver is not particularly fast), but is more consistent and allows for larger amounts of saved data.

If you used the site previously and now have a too-large cookie on your machine, delete all cookies from goro.am:

Firefox: Click Tools -> Options -> Privacy tab. Click the "Show Cookies" button. Click on any cookie with "goro.am" in it. Click the "Remove Cookie" button. Now you should be all set.
Internet Explorer: Unfortunately, you can't delete individual cookies easily in IE. Either go to Tools -> Interner Options -> General tab and click the "Delete Cookies..." to delete all cookies from all websites. Or open a Windows Explorer window, go to C:\Documents and Settings\your_username\Cookies and look for a file named something like your_username@goro[2].txt and delete the file. Look for and delete any file that has "@goro" in it. This should do the trick.

If you're still having problems with the cookies, email me at bugs@goro.am and I'll try to help. That's everything for this mini-release. Now I'm off to work on adding photos and text to your routes. Stay tuned.

Version 1.0

2008-06-15T16:33:00.002-04:00

Not that many people read this blog, or are visiting the site much, but I'm sorry I haven't updated it in a few months. Is it not, however, because I haven't been working on it - it's because I've been trying to finish off the next major release for GoRoam. And this major release, I'm happy to announce, is finally finished and launched. I'm calling this release version 1.0, because I feel like it's now more of a real application than just a minor web tool. This, I hope, is the beginning of a real push by GoRoam to gain visibility and users. Here's the list of new features that you'll find with this release:

User accounts - hooray! Now you can create a personal user account, log in, and use all of GoRoam's features. This is the start of what will become a larger community based on sharing information through and on maps. Currently, users are fairly disconnected in their interactions, but in the coming months I'm planning on incorporating more of the typical features of an online community (blogging, photos, comments, tagging, etc., etc.).
Saving routes. If you were using GoRoam as a distance calculator before, you had to draw your route from scratch every time, but no longer do you have to do that. Now you can draw a route, save it, and refer back to it in the future. You can also share routes with your friends, since each route has its own URL.
New sharing menu. I decided that it was too much to keep up with the latest social bookmarking and online networking tools, so now I'm using the AddThis interface. This should make it easier for you, the user, to share pages (and your routes) from the site.

Those are the main new features. The list isn't long, but a lot went into building those features. Now that they are finished, I should have an easier time building on top of this base, so you should expect to see updates more frequently. Here's a list of features I'm planning on adding in the near future:

Blog entries, photos, and tags at points along the routes
Better in-site searching
Deleting routes and user accounts
Importing routes from GPS units

That's the short-list for now. As always, feel free to email me with ideas or suggestions at: ideas@goro.am. And, of course, if you find a bug, please report it to bugs@goro.am.

Version 0.2.3

2008-02-22T08:21:00.002-05:00

Here's a minor version update that fixes a few small bugs:

Added "move point" functionality. Now if you click on a point (as opposed to a line segment), you move the point when clicking a new location on the map - instead of the old behavior of inserting a new point after the selected point.
Fixed some weirdness when clicking on the route; segments were being selected incorrectly in certain situations, which hopefully is now fixed.
Hide the blinking cursor when the "find location" box is hidden.

That's all for now. I'm thinking the next version will be a more major one, including user accounts, logging in, and saving routes. So you may not see a new update for a few weeks, but when you do the improvements should be significant.

Version 0.2.2

2008-02-13T20:48:00.003-05:00

Let's just call this the Mac-fix-release. I fixed a number of problems that I noticed while using GoRoam on a Mac in both FireFox and Safari (mostly Safari). All you PC users, you shouldn't see any difference with this release, except for the new Quick Start Guide. I created this page because I think that educating users on how to use the site will be one of my biggest hurdles - feel free to email me any thoughts about what is/isn't clear about the site's usage instructions. Now the main updates included in this release:

It actually works on Safari! I figured I wasn't going to even bother with Safari, but the fixes to get the site to a usable state were kind of minor, so now I'll plan on supporting Safari from here forward. It may just be my slow test machine or my old version of Safari, but I find that Safari is still much slower than FireFox on a Mac, so I'd recommend using FireFox if you have the choice.
Tool highlighting - it seems that websites cannot use custom cursors in any browser on a Mac. I was using custom cursors to indicate which tool you were using on the map, so it wasn't very obvious which tool was active when using the site on a Mac (PC users should see the cursors without a problem). Instead, I'm highlighting the active tool by increasing the size of the button in the toolbar. It's kind of ugly, so if you have any better ideas, feel free to email them to me.
I also made some minor layout fixes.

That's it for this release. All you Mac users can now use the site with the knowledge that it is at a working level on par with your PC brethren.

New Test Computer

2008-01-30T22:05:00.000-05:00

Well it's kind of old, it's a desktop, and it's not even a cool color, but the first GoRoam test computer just arrived in the mail. It's one of those iMac computers with the processor inside the monitor and even though I thought I'd never own a Mac, I am excited to have it so I can test GoRoam for all you Mac users.

As soon as it arrived, I fired it up, got it on the internet, and discovered a few things:

Microsoft stopped making Internet Explorer for the Mac at version 5.2. Who knew? Certainly not me. So I guess that means GoRoam will never work in IE on a Mac. Good to know.
GoRoam does have some problems in Firefox on the Mac, so I'll have to look into it more closely to see what it will take to fix them. I'll post more information on this when I have it.
GoRoam seems to work to a certain extent in Safari, so maybe I'll decide to support Safari in future versions. We'll see.

With this new-old computer in my posession, Mac users can expect some fixes soon.

Version 0.2.1

2008-01-27T16:27:00.000-05:00

Well it's only been a week since I launched GoRoam, and I've already fixed some things. This is a minor new version, including the following changes:

Cursors for the toolbar tools.
A tool to clear the line from the map and start over.
Zoom in when finding a location.
Double-click on the map to re-center and zoom in one level.
Highlighting of the distance box when the distance toolbar button is clicked.
Better instructions on how to use the tools.

Next, I'm going to work on undo/redo functionality. As always, if you have comments, great ideas, or bugs to report, feel free to contact us.

Welcome to the GoRoam Blog

2008-01-20T17:19:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone. This is the first post on the GoRoam blog, where I'll be keeping track of feature additions, bug fixes, and version launches for my site GoRoam. For more information about GoRoam, please visit the Frequently Asked Questions page and the About Us page.

Well, it's taken me a long time to get to this point, but I'm finally launching GoRoam. I started working on this site roughly 1.5 years ago with two other guys. Since then, my partners have left the team in order to pursue an around-the-world sailing trip (and I say, good for them - I wish I could do the same), the name of the site has changed, and so too has the general approach. Instead of launching a fully-formed application, I'm going to start small and build up from the base of the current version of GoRoam. This first version is a simple distance calculator. I run a lot and often wonder exactly how far I've gone (I keep track of my runs in a running log); GoRoam is an easy was for me to map out a route and see how far I went. That's the entirety of the site right now. But I'm planning on adding an unending list of features:

Logging in to the site to save and share routes.
Adding text, images, and video at any point along the route.
Importing and exporting the data from/into common data formats.
Etc, etc, etc.

To give you an idea of the later stages, GoRoam will be something that makes it easy for you to document a road trip in its entirety: where (on a map) you went, when you were there, what you saw while you were there (in images and video), and what you thought about it (in text). It also may turn into something where you can map out a route you did (on a road trip or a run or a bike ride or a sailing trip or a ski adventure or a ... you get the idea), share it with a community of others in your area (Crested Butte mountain bikers, for example), log when you do that route, and see how other people have done that route. Whatever it becomes, the focus will always be on pinning information to a location on a map.

GoRoam is something that I think a lot of people will find useful. As such, I fully intend to keep it free to use, for anyone who wants to use it. I would also like to keep it free of advertisements and will do so unless it becomes too much of a drain on my funds.

Right now, this project is something that I devote a lot of time to, but it's not my full-time job; maybe some day in the future I will be able to work on GoRoam full time. While GoRoam remains a side project, I can definitely use the help of the general public. If you like the site, please tell your friends about it. Any time you find something wrong with the site, email me about it. And if you have great ideas about what I should add to the site, I would love to hear them.

So please use and enjoy GoRoam. I'll continue working on it, adding gradual improvements, and I'll post all changes to the site on this blog.

Ryan Martin

ryan@goro.am

Version 0.2

2008-01-20T17:15:00.000-05:00

This is the first version of GoRoam. It includes:

Creating lines on the map.
Deleteing points from the lines.
Keeping track of line distances.
Finding locations on the map.
A draggable zoom box.