Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Printing on WriteMaps has always been more difficult than I'd like it to be. Some browsers helpfully tile a large sitemap across several printed pages while others simply print a crop of the top left portion of the map. Since the majority of browsers seem to do the latter, I've received numerous messages requesting better print control and I've been working hard at figuring out a good solution. Tonight I added a new print preview feature to the application to give users more control over their print output. You can get to this preview screen by selecting "Print" in the WriteMaps toolbar File menu, as shown:
Clicking print will bring you to the new print preview interface. A dotted red box represents your paper size and you can adjust its dimensions using the text inputs at the top of the page. This will give you a good idea of how much of your sitemap will fit on your printed page. This tool becomes particularly useful for printing large sitemaps, because you can drag and zoom your sitemap around to bring different sections of your sitemap into the printable area. This allows you to make printed tiles of your map which can be pieced together after printing. Here's what the print preview looks like:
I hope this helps everyone out! Feel free to leave a comment and let me know how you like it. Also, as always, if you notice any buggy behavior, please use the feedback form to report it so it can be taken care of right away. Thanks!
Developer Footnote
Many of the features such as zooming, dragging, and page sorting are all made much more possible due to the incredible jQuery UI library. It's really surprising how quickly I can now go from concept to production with features that would have taken weeks or months to develop in the past. I should admit as a disclosure that I'm a member of the jQuery design team, but I certainly have no part in the magic that is jQuery and jQuery UI. So that said, keep it up guys, you're making the jobs of designers like me a whole lot more enjoyable!
Posted by Scott on 04/29 at 04:15 AM
Friday, April 25, 2008
Google's Webmaster Central Blog posted this morning that it is dropping support for the OAI-PMH sitemap protocol in favor of the XML standard. This is good news for WriteMaps users who have been using our application's export feature for their XML sitemaps. WriteMaps uses the standard XML sitemap schema specified at Sitemaps.org for its XML export. Looks like the standard has caught on and is here to stay!
Link: Retiring support for OAI-PMH in Sitemaps
Posted by Scott on 04/25 at 10:29 AM
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Ever since WriteMaps launched, I've received several emails per week requesting the ability to sort pages. Many a glowing review has been tainted with this caveat, but despite my best efforts, it just wasn't going to come easy. Well Finally, tonight (or this morning I should say...) I'm happy to announce that you can now sort your pages to your heart's content. Simply click on a page in your sitemap and drag it around. As you drag your page over the rest of the map, highlighted 'drop zones' will appear as guides to let you know where it is safe to drop.
You can sort pages that have child pages as well. And like the other editing features in WriteMaps, sorting is tracked in your undo menu so you can always revert back to where you were. I'm very excited to finally have this feature up and running so please give it a spin and let me know what you think! And as usual, if you run into any problems or obscure bugs, please use the feedback form so we can get in touch with you and resolve the issue quickly.
Thanks and enjoy!
Posted by Scott on 04/08 at 01:42 AM
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Yesterday was moving day. The time had come to move WriteMaps to a better, faster, and more reliable server environment. Despite prolonged down time, the move went very well. I'm happy to announce that WriteMaps has settled into its new home quite nicely, with noticeable speed improvements when browsing from page to page.
I want to thank all the WriteMaps members for their patience during the move yesterday. I always aim to keep downtime to a minimum and it appears that this move will help with that moving forward. The new hosting environment also opens up some new technical opportunities which were unavailable on the previous setup, and I expect this to result in some cool new features and speed improvements in the very new future! Thanks again and enjoy!
Posted by Scott on 04/03 at 07:45 AM
