Randy Troppmann

On Monday (18.09.2006) I presented at EFUG and my topic was RUNNINGMAP.com and the use of Yahoo! Maps. Grant Skinner chaired the meeting and talked about recent news he gathered from the recent FlashForward conference. One very exciting tidbit was that his company in conjunction with Metaliq has been hired by Adobe and is developing what will be the V3 components for Flash 9. This is an amazing coup for him and good news for the rest of us. A couple years ago his group (including the notable Phil Chung) created GLIC which has since been rebranded as mCom and is being sold by Metaliq. These components were developed because the Macromedia V2 components were widely maligned due to bloated architecture, overly complex inheritance chain and difficult skinning procedures. I am a user of mCom components which solve these issues. Since the V3 components will require a complete rewrite to take advantage of AS3, the new components will be even better and a huge step forward for components that come bundled with Flash.

With increased traffic on RUNNINGMAP.com has come increased cost of hosting. My friend was hosting the site on his co-located box for free. But for the last several months my site has been shredding his bandwidth so I decided to move to a new host where bandwidth cost is cheaper. My friend did not kick me off his server … he is stoked that the site is getting a lot of traffic. The move was done carefully since there is data and middlewear involved. All went well for the most part. One drawback is that new mySQL DB would timeout on executing SQL dump from the old DB so I had to split the file up into about 5 chunks. Also, the chat app is down for the moment.

Consequently I have been thinking about a business model around this site to generate some money since the site is now costing money. For the short term I have added a donation button. There have been 4 donations to date. Interesting to see a minor drop in traffic since I added the donation button. I have no way to know if the two issues are related.

Also notable is that Permalinks has been updated so it now remembers the map mode. This was necessary because some of the new foreign city maps added are available only as Satellite View and Permalinks was defaulting to Map View when a route was loaded from the DB. Not anymore!