MeterPodu

A crowdsourcing tool to get approximate auto-rickshaw fares for cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Coimbatore & Mysore

[meterpodu]

Now login using Google OpenID

Few people had complained using the contact form on the site that they wanted to submit fares but were unable to do so because they were neither on twitter or facebook.

We decided to use the OpenID feature of Google to let people login using their GMail addresses and hopefully cover 95% of the population!

Yes there are a few people who still use hotmail, yahoo & rediff, but we might someday  include those as well. As of now, anyone with a Google account can login and add fares. I hope we've made it as simple as possible.

PS: we used lightopenid to help with the Google logins.

[meterpodu]

The Media loves us!

Our phones have been ringing and inboxes flooded with emails from journalists wanting to do a story about the site. The response has been overwhelming and this is far far more than we ever expected. I'll keep adding to this post as they keep coming.

Auto fare is just a click away - Deccan Chronicle

Tell fleecing autorickshaw drivers 'Meterpodu' - The New Indian Express

Meter podu! - The Hindu

Meter does matter - News Today

Auto Suggestion - The Economic Times

Meter down, please - Postnoon Magazine

[meterpodu]

Let's go mobile my dear

A majority of our users complained of poor mobile experience opening the site over GPRS and the fields/images were bleeding over.

We began working on a mobile site shelving our plans to release an app temporarily. We first stripped out the maps making it a feature that could be turned on by a button. Thereby we let the user decide if he/she wants to just get/add fares or see the route on a map.

We then removed the latest tweets feature, for it made no sense to load additional Kbs over GPRS/EDGE. The buttons and text fields were also shortened and better aligned to fit on a screen without any horizontal scrolling.

We moved the twitter and FB login buttons to the page from the navbar so that they are easily seen. We also reduced the overall width of the site to reduce scrolling.

The last piece was to auto-detect mobile browsers and redirect them to the mobile version. We noticed that the site detects tablets/ipads as mobile browsers despite having the real estate to render the entire site. We'll work on adding a link that lets you visit the main site from a mobile browser and not just force you to only use the mobile version.

Hit us up from a smartphone and tell us how the site looks!

[meterpodu]

We love the traffic surge but GMaps API doesn't!

Such a nice headache to have, thanks to all the FB shares/likes & Twitter RTs, we went up from averaging 1000 visits/day to 4000+!

While we were rejoicing the visitor jump, the site began to falter. Turns out that GMaps has a 2500 per day API limit for free usage. With a non-money making site, it made no sense to pay for business usage limits.

It was back to the drawing board for us, to see if we could cache queries to Google Maps for routes already viewed and only send new requests their way. We also took the co-ordinates from the frontend, there by reducing API calls.

The twitter bot however still relied on the API calls and the Mobile version, SMS gateway that we were going to release would still count towards the GMaps API.

Luckily we found cloudmade that had an API for routing & geo-coding using Open Street Maps. We are now using it as a fall back whenever we go over the GMaps API limit.

Hope that takes care of our mapping issues

[meterpodu]

Type ahead suggestions & new cities

Love the feedback we are getting via twitter & Facebook.

One such request was to implement type ahead suggestions for the source & destination fields. It helps weed out duplicates and typos in our dataset plus also saves the user from typing out the whole word.

We also were asked to include cities like Coimbatore & Mysore where according to the requesters teh auto-rickshaw mafia is bigger than that of Chennai & Bangalore put together!

We've also gone into the database and weeded out duplicate entries and hopefully the typeahead suggestions will let people select their source & destination without having to type them out again.

[meterpodu]

The final pieces of the puzzle

The site is looking good, friends have been testing it out to iron out any chinks.

Created a Facebook page and now the site supports Facebook logins to add fares. Guess that makes a lot more sense, since a majority of users are bound to have Facebook accounts than be on Twitter.

Added a section to show the latest tweets by the bot and hope to encourage more twitter users to use it.

Enabled basic JavaScript validation for the forms to prevent submission of empty values. The contact us page also works & uses a separate inbox.

This blog has also been put into the header of the site, allowing people to follow the latest developments.

[meterpodu]

Dude, where's my domain!

GoDaddy says that meterdown.in is taken. God some fool registered it in 2008 & never renewed it. It seems to have expired but hasn't been released into the pool of available domains yet.

Oh we could try to go with meter-down.in, now that's available & fancy as well.

Hold it, some guys in Mumbai run advertisements on the back panels of auto rickshaws. They call themselves meterdown as well! What's worse, they've got the co.in domain.

Quick meeting with @anantha, we've come up with a new name! It's snazzier, more fun & has a nice ring to it.

Quick lets see if it is available, bloody hell it is!

Let's call ourselves MeterPodu, and get that domain .

Oh shit, gotta do a huge find-replace job and triple-check all the functions.

[meterpodu]

Houston we have a skin!

Sat up all friday night, swore not to rest till the UI was done.

Twitter-Bootstrap was a life saver, had to play with the colours and padding of a few components. Otherwise it was smooth sailing & worked like a dream.

HTML5, CSS3, what's not to like. Oh Google maps looks horrible in IE, we'll get to that later

Twitter integration works fine, put up some rules to query the bot & add fares.