Howdy, Spotstorians!  We did a major system update on April 24, 2007 around 11:45 ET.  We hope you enjoy.  This release contains:

• KML support See your Spots in Google Maps and Google Earth!
• Rails 1.2.3 We’ve updated to the latest and greatest Rails!
• Bug fixes Always some bug fixes for you!

KML

You can now view your Spots using either Google Earth or Google Maps.  There are a couple of ways to do this.

Google Maps

Currently, the only way to see a Spot is to provide a URL in the search box.  When Google has crawled the site (the next day or so), you’ll be able to find your Spot in the Google search results.

To see your Spot right now, go to a Spot, take its URL, copy it into the Google Maps search box, and append the suffix “kml” onto it like so:

  http://www.spotstory.com/spots/show/120.kml

To see what this looks like, just click here.

As I mentioned, Google hasn’t sucked our KML into their index yet, but when they do, you should start seeing your Spots appear in Google Maps under the “See user-created content” link at the bottom of the left-hand side of the page.

We’ll let you know when this happens.

Google Earth

To see your spots on Google Earth, you can go to the Spot, and click on the “KML” link under the map.  If you have Google Earth installed, it should load automatically.  (If you don’t have Google Earth installed you can can download it from here.)

You can also right-click to save the content to disk, and load it into Google Earth from there.

Rails 1.2.3

This isn’t a change you’ll notice, but we get a lot of traffic from the Ruby on Rails community, so we thought it made sense to mention that our production environment is now using Rails 1.2.3.  For details, you can see Aron’s great post about his Rails 1.2.3 upgrade travails.

Thank You!

That’s all for this update.  Please let us know if you find any problems.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the site either with content, comments, or attention!

We (well, Aron) pushed out our first update to the site tonight. It adds a couple of slick features and begins to remedy a major usability problem that our very brave alpha testers pointed out. We’ve still got a pile of bugs to fix (look for an upcoming bog entry on that.)

We’re going to begin letting a few more people into the site soon. If you would like to be one of them at some point go to www.spotstory.com and sign up already!

Over the next couple of days we’ll start to talk a little bit more about what the site actually does, but right now I think I am going to go look for a beer.

Thanks again to all of the pioneering spotstorians!

As mentioned below, yesterday evening we did a very-alpha, wicked soft launch to a couple friends and family. That’s why the blog has been pretty quiet the past week or so.

We’re dribbling the site out to just a couple of people at a time. We intend on providing a smooth initial site visit for users. Since we only know a few people, and those folks can only have one first impression, we’re rationing ourselves.

It’s been tremendously informative. We’ve got a substantial list of things to change, but cumulatively they make the site 50% better already. That isn’t too shabby for a couple hours of feedback.

Thanks to everyone who has helped out so far.

Exciting times!