Posted by Philippe
Ourbis is now listed in the Montreal Start-up Index at techvibes.com, in case you want to monitor that.
I find this list is actually really interesting to discover all the other projects ;)
See the Canadian Start-up Index too.
Posted by Philippe
Updated recently, you will now see a map of all the businesses nearby straight from the front page, where can also discover users’ favorite businesses (the ones with a star), different icons per major category, and photos (we currently have more than 4000 photos)!
And for those who care, we also migrated to Rails 2.1, PostgreSQL 8.3 and a new update to nginx too. We’re also now using memcached for our cache instead of a filesystem store, Rails 2.1 makes it so easy.
Posted by Philippe
Great news! You can now discover great businesses in your neighborhood right from the frontpage!
The more complete the business’ profile page is, the better it will rank. The idea is that a more complete profile page will help you decide more easily if the place is worth it or not.
There’s also an internal ranking system which will bring up the score for businesses reviewed by “top reviewers”.
Posted by Philippe
Last night I added a little something to the indexing/searching so it deals better with business names that have only 1 letter, a space, 1 letter, a space, etc.
For example in Québec, we have the CLSC’s, they’re all listed as “C L S C CityNameHere”.
We’re now indexing “more than one time [1 letter + 1 space]” as 1 word, making it CLSC instead.
This will help with all the businesses with acronyms, like “C. A. M. U.” (now indexed as CAMU) or “J G Construction” (you can search for JG, or J G).
Posted by Philippe
Last night we finished some Facebook integration. It’s basically an application that will let Ourbis figure out links between people and let you search in your friends bookmarks.
The idea is basically this: if you bookmark ~5 businesses you like. And all your friends bookmark ~5 businesses too. It’ll quickly grow into a HUGE database of information!
Even if your friend doesn’t actually review the business (write text) but just bookmarks it, it’s still an indication over another that it might be worth to look at this particular one over another (unless it’s rated 1!)
Feel free to email us if you have suggestions, comments, etc. And we hope you will participate!
If you’re wondering, we used the RFacebook gem and Rails plugin, but modified it a little bit so it doesn’t takeover our whole application (the filters are not controller-by-controller).
Posted by Philippe
Depuis maintenant plusieurs semaines, nous remarquons que les gens ont de la difficulté à faire des recherches sur le site, car le lieu de départ doit être fourni et il ne l’est pas en premier lieu. Le résultat, l’utilisateur se fait demander “d’où venez-vous ?”
Plusieurs seraient sûrement contents que la recherche s’effectue même si les distances/l’ordre ne sont pas tout à fait exactes.
Ah, si on pouvait trouver assez facilement d’où ils viennent pour eux… Bien sûr que c’est possible, il suffit d’utiliser l’adresse IP. Jusqu’à aujourd’hui, on avait pas vraiment trouvé grand chose de bien pour le faire.
Aujourd’hui, on tombe sur un site qui fait du reverse lookup sur les IP, qui utilise la base de donnée de MaxMind ou celle de HostIp.info
Je connaissais déjà hostip.info, et c’est un super beau projet ouvert, mais pour toutes les IPs que j’ai essayées, rien…
Par contre, maxmind semblait beaucoup plus précis ! Intéressant…
Une petite recherche sur Google, et une implantation simple et rapide pour Rails:
Super fast IP to LAT LNG in Rails part 2
Voilà ! À partir d’aujourd’hui, les visiteurs qui viennent sur Ourbis.com auront un lieu de départ près de chez eux, ce qui nous permettra de montrer des commerces intéressants et favoriser les échanges entre les utilisateurs.
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Since a couple of weeks, we see that people have problems at the time of searching because the starting point needs to be set and it’s not until they set it. We basically need to ask the user “where are you from?”
Many would probably be happy if the search was done anyway showing the relevant results even if the distance shown is not that accurate.
If only we could easily find from where people are… Of course it’s possible, we only need to use the IP address. Until today, we hadn’t found a good source to do that.
Today, we got on a site that does reverse lookup on IPs that uses data from MaxMind or the one from HostIp.info
I already knew about hostip.info, and it’s a really nice open project but for all the IPs I tried, nothing…
maxmind, seemed a lot more precise! Interesting…
A little Googling, and a simple and fast Rails howto:
Super fast IP to LAT LNG in Rails part 2
That’s it! From today, the visitors who come on Ourbis.com will have a start location near where they are, which will allow us to show them interesting businesses and ease interaction between users.
Posted by Philippe
Ruby on Rails 2.0 went out on December 6th 2007, and a 2.0.1 shortly after.
We'll soon upgrade Ourbis to this new version which sports many new features!
Link to blog post and changes: http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done
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Ruby on Rails 2.0 est sorti le 7 décembre 2007, et 2.0.1 un tout petit peu après.
Ourbis sera mis à jour sous peu à cette nouvelle version qui contient plusieurs nouvelles fonctionnalités !
Lien vers le message sur le blogue et les changements que la nouvelle version apporte : http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done
Posted by Philippe
Dans "La Presse" :
"Un projet de partenariat financier entre la Ville de Montréal et l’organisme Île sans fil fait son chemin dans les couloirs de l’hôtel de ville. L’objectif : tapisser les parcs et lieux publics montréalais de 400 nouveaux points gratuits d’accès à l’internet sans fil (WiFi)."
On parle potentiellement de 200,000$ par année à Ile sans Fil.
C'est excellent !
Moi qui suis souvent à la recherche de WiFi gratuit à Montréal, ça risque d'être beaucoup plus facile dans le futur. Espérons que la couverture sera un peu plus homogène que présentement :)
Lien vers l'article sur Cyberpresse
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In "La Presse":
Partnership between the city of Montréal and Ile sans Fil.
Posted by Philippe
Version française plus bas.
3 months ago, I contacted my regional newspaper to tell them how great Ourbis was and that we were proud to have brought something that will help local businesses get more exposure for free and promote smaller cities and neighborhoods.
They have a list of "websites made by people from here", and they welcome people to email them the address of their website so they include it in their listings.
We thought they were going to be more than happy to link to Ourbis, and maybe even talk about us as a little side story in the printed paper like "two guys from here help promote businesses in the region for free on the web".
BZZZT! Wrong! 3 months later (after asking them 2-3 times why they hadn't replied to my email), the director replied to me saying they had "something similar going on that they will launch soon on their website".
Of course the person is in total conflict of interests and refuses to publish something that they think could be in competition with what they will do (even though it doesn't).
I guess my regional newspaper is a bit biased.
Forget them, next: we'll get in touch with the cities and hopefully get better results! THEY sure will like free promotion for the city and the businesses.
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Il y a maintenant 3 mois, j'ai contacté mon journal régional afin de leur dire combien génial était Ourbis et combien nous étions fiers d'avoir lancé quelque chose qui allait aider à la promotion et a la meilleure visibilité des commerces locaux et des villes et quartiers, tout cela gratuitement.
Ils ont une liste de "sites web faits par les gens d'ici", et nous invitent même à leur envoyer l'adresse de notre site web par courriel afin qu'ils puissent l'ajouter dans leur liste.
Nous pensions qu'ils seraient plus qu'heureux d'ajouter un lien vers Ourbis, et peut-être même parler un petit peu de nous dans une colonne de la publication papier, citant quelque chose comme "deux gars d'ici aident à la promotion des commerces de la région gratuitement sur le web".
BZZZT! Erreur! 3 mois plus tard (après leur avoir demandé 2 ou 3 fois pourquoi ils n'avaient pas répondu à mon courriel), la direction m'a répondu me disant qu'ils avaient "quelque chose de semblable qu'ils allaient lancer sur leur site web et qu'ils verraient mal de nous faire de la promotion".
Vous vous en doutez, cette personne est totalement en conflit d'intérêts et refuse de publier quelque chose qui pourrait être en compétition avec ce qu'ils font (même si ce n'est pas vrai).
J'imagine que mon journal régional est un peu biaisé. Oublions-les, prochainement nous allons contacter les villes directement en espérant avoir de meilleurs résultats! Peut-être qu'EUX ont à coeur la promotion gratuite de leur ville et des commerces.
Posted by Philippe
I've been playing with GIS data of Canada recently and thought it would be a good idea to plot areas in cities where we have "Ourbis coverage".
These images will eventually end up on the cities' and provinces' portal on Ourbis.com to show which areas have been covered.
The black dots represent businesses. The red circles (bigger) show businesses for which we have a photo, review or description. The more red the circle/path is, the more businesses are covered in that area.
You can see what it looks like in the following cities for now:
If you're wondering about all the holes in Montréal: I did not draw the city coverage of the "greater montreal area", so it does not include the cities that haven't merged into Montréal a few years ago.
Posted by Jocelyn
I recently had to dynamically add rounded corners to uploaded images in a Rails application.
While a quick search lead me to a few online tutorials, they really were too complex for what I had in mind.
So here is what will give you nice rounded corners with white background (no transparency), easily.
You will need RMagick, a Ruby library based on ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick that offers great image manipulation and drawing funtions.
require 'RMagick'
include Magick
# will return the new image
def rounded_corners(image)
width = image.columns
height = image.rows
# create a masq of same size
masq = Image.new(width, height)
d = Draw.new
# 10 is the corner's radius
d.roundrectangle(0, 0, width - 1, height - 1, 10, 10)
d.draw(masq)
image.composite(masq, 0, 0, LightenCompositeOp)
endHow does it work? Well, we simply create an image with a black rounded-corner rectangle on white background. Then we use composite with Lighten. This will increase brightness in the source image, the black rectangle having no effect, while the white corners will force white in the resulting image.
And... that's it. Easy enough I guess. I did not bother messing around with transparency since the JPEG format does not support it anyway.
Posted by Philippe
There's a couple new features on Ourbis, including the ability to see all the changes to the directory (link on the frontpage). Also, you can now see other people's contributions, and an iGoogle widget.
Posted by Jocelyn
With this release, Ourbis goes nation-wide with a complete Canada coverage.
Add to this a more usable interface and improvments all over the place, we now offer a great way to find and promote local businesses.
Don't hesitate to send us feedback!
Posted by Jocelyn
Ourbis just got a major facelift. But changes made to the site go much deeper than just good look. This new brew brings you real user profiles with avatars, recent activity, improved search (including suggestions), RSS feeds, and much more!
We would like to thank all our users for the tremendous feedback that helped us make Ourbis even better. Enjoy!
Posted by Jocelyn
We just launched Ourbis.com! Covering the great Montreal area to start, with over 100,000 businesses, Ourbis brings you new ways to find and discover local businesses.
Not from the Montréal area? Don't worry, Ourbis aims at growing fast and you can contribute to this. Feel free to enter the businesses you like anywhere in Canada.
Ourbis site tour / Guide d'Ourbis
Philippe's Ourbis profile and address book
Jocelyn's Ourbis profile and address book
