Daily Archives: March 1, 2007

The rise and rise of IE7

Juha posted recently about his server stats, noting that IE7 has overtaken IE6 and that Firefox is now 1/3rd of the market.

This is a reflection of the tech-savvy-ness of his audience.

Looking at the server stats for February across all of the Trade Me sites:

  • IE7 has increased to 26.7%. While this is up from 12.2% in December it is still some way behind IE6 at 55.3%
  • Firefox users are slowly shifting across to Firefox 2.0, which is now up to 6.4%. But, the overall market share across the three different versions of Firefox combined is steady at just under 13%, where it has been for the last 6 months.
  • Windows Vista (or is that Vus-tah in this part of the world?) is only just on the radar at 0.6%.

Interesting times!

Zopto, and a comparison of mapping URLs

Ben Nolan’s presentation from last years Where 2.0 conference is now online at IT conversations.

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1719.html

He talks about “zopto”, which is the name given to the URL addressing scheme created by ProjectX and used on zoomin.co.nz and smaps.co.nz.

Implementing URLs which can be easily spidered by search engines is a great idea.

Perhaps more importantly, having short human-readable (sort of!) URLs which can easily be pasted into an email makes the site much more usable and much more likely to spread via word of mouth.

Here are some links to the Trade Me office on some alternative mapping sites.

smaps.co.nz
http://smaps.co.nz/nz/wellington/wellington+wharf/cable+street/11/

maps.google.com
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=11+cable+street,+wellington,
+new+zealand&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=46.630055,82.265625&
layer=&ie=UTF8&z=16&om=1&iwloc=addr

local.live.com
http://local.live.com/?v=2&sp=Point.83jh45zjyf51_11%2520Cable%2520
St%252c%2520Wellington%25206001%252c%2520New%2520Zealand___

maps.yahoo.com
It found Wellington, but couldn’t find the specific street address.

Perhaps X needs to spend some more time with Y and teach them a little bit about our country. :-)

wises.co.nz
http://www.wises.co.nz/?point=-41.289148_174.778663|1

Finding this URL was not easy. Here’s what I had to do:

  1. Locate the ‘mail’ icon which is hidden away at the bottom of the map;
  2. Send it to myself (they provide a form and don’t actually let you see the URL at this point);
  3. Click on the link in the resulting email;
  4. Manually fix it in the browser, because the “|” character causes problems in Firefox which appears to use this to break URLs across separate tabs.

Painful!

Wises is currently the most popular mapping site in NZ. They had 290,000 unique visitors in January compared to just over 100,000 for Smaps. This time last year they had 226,000 unique visitors and smaps didn’t exist. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next 12 months.

aamaps.co.nz
I gave up!

If anybody can work out how to get the URL for one of their maps please let me know how you did it and I’ll update this post. I won’t hold my breath.