Platial News and Neogeography

Platial Will Return Soon

As those of you who have used platial over the past 4 years know, we have never been great at uptime. This current situation is similar, we are working hard to bring things back up but it's taking longer than we would have thought.

Don't despair, the maps will return.

Stupid Mistake Meets Technical Nightmare

As some of you noticed, Platial.com was down for a shameful 24 hours yesterday and today. Things should be back to normal for most of you now that we can see DNS propagating.

I'd like to apologize deeply for what was essentially a stupid mistake that spiraled down into a chaotic and stressful day for everyone depending on the platial services. I'd like to extend an especially warm thanks to the members who reached out with concern and responded with patience.

We'll be back up shortly

Minor snag with domain, for those of you who are having trouble accessing the site, it should be resolved shortly.
Grrr.

Map Bounds Bug: I Can Fix it for You

Recently we discovered a new bug. Several people reported it on our forum. If a Place is added to a map outside the area you want the map to include and then you delete that place, the site fails to recompute the map bounds. That means that the map stays zoomed out too far, spoiling the display of your markers.

We are working on a fix, but if you have a map which is looking a little wonky because of this bug, I can fix it for you right away.

You can leave a note on the forum if you want me to fix your map, or email me tracy-at-platial(dot)com. Be sure to tell me the url of your map.

Some Minor Troubles

Update
Everything now seems to be under control. We have captured and rehabilitated the rogue query which was killing the database.

**********

Platial is having some problems this morning, but we're working frantically to get everything sorted out and to get the site back up and running for you. We are very sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.

Tourmapper is on the Fritz

The Tourmapper, which makes maps from the upcoming shows lists on MySpace Music pages, is not working right now. MySpace has made a few changes to the way they handle the tours, inadvertently breaking our little widget. We're working on making the changes we need to make in order to get the Tourmapper working again.

Technical Difficulties

Update at 9:09 AM PST: We've got everything stabilized now. Thanks for your patience.

Posted at 8:22 AM PST
We're having some little database hiccups. We're taking care of it right now. We apologize for the hassle.

All fixed

T'was just a minor thing, all fixed.

Can't Log In... Oh No!

I am very sorry, Platial users. We were having a little glitch with our log in just now. If you got logged out in the middle of doing something you have our sincere apologies.

MapKit and Blogs

Seems we were a bit premature in promoting MapKit to bloggers.  Seems the converting of line breaks, the stripping of .js and the wysiwyg vs plain text editors are conspiring against many bloggers. 

Updated code and clarified documentation coming very shortly.

UPDATE:

In our excitement to get this into the hands of eager users, we neglected one big chunk of QA: Adding a MapKit in a blog post may break the XML of an associated RSS feed.  Use with caution.  This particular issue may be fixed by wrapping the code in a "cdata" tag

but we haven't finished testing this yet.

Here is a summary of what we have learned so far.  Please get back to us with any more information you may come across.

Does It Work on...MySpace, TypePad, Blogger, WordPress, my website?

The various blog products and services process the entry content in several ways.  Some strip out javascript, some convert the ampersand and other characters in a way that breaks the functionality, even when posted as 'plain text' or 'html'.  The javascript has also been known to actually break the RSS of an entire site.  Basically, be careful using this inside a blog.  We recommend using it outside the post heirarchy, either in the template somewhere (we've seen it used in the header of a blog) or in a seperate page (like the 'about' page offered on many blogs).  If the code is being appended with 'br' tags, you may have to convert the entire code snippet into a single line of plain text.

Details on known blog products and services

• MySpace
  • Not supported
• TypePad
  • Adding into a post in the 'html' tab works.
  • Creating a new page using advanced templates works.
• Blogger
  • You cannot add it as a Post to your Blogger blog, but you can insert it into the template (like in the page header).
• WordPress
  • We are currently working with WordPress.com on a custom integration.
  • This Widget Plugin may be able to help those with self hosted WordPress blogs.
• My own html site
  • The only known issue on html sites is that the page must actually contain a <p><span style="font-family: Verdana,Arial,sans-serif;">&quot;body&quot;</span></p> tag.

If your service does not work with MapKit, send the site a feedback email asking for it. They may not know that their users want map widgets.

Ok, again, thanks for bearing with us on this hectic day of quick fixes!!

More info, more docs, more fixes still rolling out.