Updates

I have added a couple of sites that I think maybe of interest to visitors to the site. The first one is Zenbu which has the locations of many different things around NZ from rest areas to businesses. Its like the Yellowpages except it has more things and doesn’t cost anything to add to it. It is user contributed as well, so you can add to it. I have the Zenbu locations as POI in my GPS and they are really handy. There is also an iPhone app for it.

The second one is PocketSmith which is a local Dunedin startup. It is a web based money management program. Its strength is the use of calendars for budgeting. I have found it really useful to use in the short time I have been using it. I will put in a disclaimer, that if you decide you like PocketSmith and sign up from my link. I will get a commission on the subscription.

I have also done a fair bit of tweaking here and there. Just trying to get the look and feel right. This is an ongoing job though.

I have made the regions better to navigate and have hidden the closer zooms beneath the regions. This makes it look tidier. I have also added checkboxes to choose the types of hotspots as is more intuitive then the button. There is a bug in this addition, which is that you can’t hide the free hotspots. This will be fixed at a later date and should only be a minor problem in the near future.

I have done a few optimisations in the back end to try and help load the pages faster. The site should now use gzip compression and browser caching. There are still a few more things that I need to do decrease the load time.

I am now also using an arbitrary version numbering system to help me in the development of the site. As it stands it is at version 0.8. These don’t mean anything of great importance as it is constantly updated, they just mark milestones in the development. Aiming for version 1.0 by the end of the month, which will have some choice new features.

As you may have seen the data is exported as a GPX and a GPI file. I have tweaked how I do this and now have much better files with more information. they now include the address and the GPI file also has a proper icon. If you have any other formats that you would like to see, please let me know and I will see what I can do.

Added new free hotspot:

• Waikato Innovation Park, Hamilton

Now 94 Free, 43 Nearly Free Hotspots in NZ

I have just recently added a comments section, that allows login via Facebook, Twitter and OpenID or as a guest. Hopefully this will mean that I will get a little more feedback on the projects.

I have added image links for my Twitter account and for JaHoog.com. I have also added image links for RSS and Email subscription, which is a feed from the news. Also have done a little bit of tidying up on the WiFi page such as the ‘Add New Hotspot’ is now in a expanding div which helps to minimise clutter on the page.

So with the end July it has been a successful month. The site got mentioned on the iPhone New Zealand site which brought some more people to the site. On two days the site had over 100 visitors which is a good milestone. The overall unique visitors for the month was 657. So hopefully more hotspots will be added by the end of next month and more features added. Looking forward to it.

So nearly free hotspots are now up. Mainly Esquires coffee shops, but I am sure there are others out there. Also looking at adding free wifi at accommodation, to the map. There may not be too many features in the next month as I will be busy. I also have a bit of work to do on the backend to get it up to scratch for the more features I am planning.

Its been just over month since the site has been up and I have received 299 unique visitors. It is still hard to find the site via search engines but hopefully over time this will improve, and be as helpful to as many people as it can.

This is something I wasn’t really sure about doing. I think that it looks alright with it there. I am rather hopeful that it may allow me to cover the hosting cost.