KYspeaks.com with brand new look and features

Ladies and gentlemen, after weeks of design and development, the new design of this blog finally goes live yesterday.

The template is the brainchild of Haze, the awesome max designer and artist who did my wall mural too. She is, of course, also my fiancée, as some of you might have found out from facebook already.

Anyway, lets dwell a bit on this theme and allow me to showcase what has been added and how the new features could be useful to you.

1. Food Map: while there was a small food map link in the previous theme, this is now a live widget on the right sidebar
   • click on the filter (KL/PJ/Penang) will resize the map and show only those results
   • click the check box of the filter allows you to select multiple filters
   • “Show Sidebar” gives a list of results, clicking the result shows an info bubble
   • “search location/cafe” searches only the results on current map view instead of the whole database, and list of results is updated on real time in sidebar
   • zoom in/out and panning functions are supported as per google map
   • “full screen”, well, that’s self explanatory
2. Twitter feed:
   • latest tweet is displayed as default
   • “expand” button dynamically expands the tweet feed to show 5 latest tweets
   • replies are filtered out to avoid cluttering the space unncessarily
3. Food post links via thumbnail (left sidebar)
   • a list of randomly generated thumbnails linking to food posts on this blog

Other than that, the blog is also updated to the latest WordPress installation and the comment system finally supports threaded replies too. Something that was supposed to be done long ago. This allows me to reply comments via the dashboard and also WordPress for Blackberry application, not to mention it makes more sense too.

the version of the KYspeaks.com till 11th July 2010

Compared to the previous theme, this is quite a major upgrade. I didn’t want to only make the changes purely on aesthetics alone, form over function is ok, but always better when you have both right?

Over the next few days we’ll be troubleshooting the new theme a bit and make necessarily debugging/changes along the way. Let me know your feedbacks yah.

The first KYspeaks Searchable Food Map

After a lot of hard work updating all the reviewed places (over 346 locations and counting) on google map, a bit of tinkering with the feed map programmed by Sheryl, here I present you with the first version of searchable food map on kyspeaks!

The page is located at map.kyspeaks.com and also accessible by clicking the “searchable food map” banner on the right.

landing page of the kyspeaks searchable food map

There are several features on this map that makes it pretty awesome

• zoom in & out, pan, and do whatever as you would, since it is google map
• clicking on little icon and a link to the post with a thumbnail pops up
• click on the link brings you to the review I did on this blog
• you can search on the top left corner too, and only results from the current view (say, ss2) is shown

zoomed into ss2, and here are all the places I reviewed

The map is not perfect, the way it looks right now isn’t exactly consistent with the blog theme, and there are still features (like routing, category, etc) to be added, but it is a start.

Check out map.kyspeaks.com now!

Suggestions are welcomed.

New features on KYspeaks – Food Maps!

In the middle of last year, I embarked on a little project to the KY eats section by spending quite a bit of time geo-tagging (almost) all the food entries for the GPS savvy readers.

Since then, google map has evolved to be a pretty useful mapping tool for Malaysia, complete with updated road names and navigational ability (right click on the maps and choose Directions from here, or Directions to here). You can also tag locations and create your very own custom maps so long as you have a google account. It is all pretty neat.

This got me an idea to make the food review locations a little bit more visual, so if you know where you want to eat, you can browse all the reviews I’ve done that are closest to the area.

In the past few days, I spent quite a bit of time creating custom google maps just for this purpose. So ladies and gentlemen, here goes!

The links to the maps are found on the top banner as well as the right sidebar under PAGES of this blog.

I now have maps for KL, PJ & Selangor, as well as Penang. More shall come soon, and these maps are constantly updated whenever an entry is added to this blog. I think I will also differentiate the type of food with different icons in the future to (default icons are limited).

You can drag, zoom (click the +/- sign on top left or double click on map), and clicking on individual icon shows a picture and a direct link of the food entries I blogged here. Try it out!

Here is the map of KL:

View Larger Map

What do you think?