International Flights

International Flights are coming soon... (!!!!)

Flog

Played with Facebook for a bit, and drafted up a page for impulsifly. Seems like a really good way to share information and build community - but it also looks like alooooooooooot of work. I wonder if we'll see jobs for Facebook admin soon... PR, must have facebook experience heehee.

Meaningful Data

Updated the table to highlight weekends instead of every second column. (Thanks Mr TC!) This makes so much more sense because the data is so much more meaningful.

Reminds me of a post from Seth Godin about generic sorts (alphabetical order, date order) being obsolete. I agree with it mostly and I want to adjust our destination in order of popularity + cost somehow.

News != Blog

I have removed the 'Whats New' section.

The first reason is because it just took too long to load. (Bad Feedburner!) I'd originally intended for this blog to be the news section. New entries are then converted into page content via a conversion service provided Feedburner. However, Feedburner simply took too long to load! And there is no good reason why we should delay the user from getting to what they are here for because of some measley 'News'.

The second reason is that, I can't guarantee all posts to be relevant. And I have found there are items worth noting, yet don't deserve to be on the main page. So I my conclusion is 'News' != 'Blog'. Visitors who are interested in the development of Impulsifly can click on the Blog link instead.

For the mean time, I have replaced the left hand side column with Google Ads.

PS: Thanks, FAQ is now spelled in caps :)

What's New?

Added the "What's new?" section to the site. We've been making quite a bit of changes, so this section just serves as a notice board. In addition to publishing system notices and updates, we'll also use this space to publish upcoming special events - when we do have special events.

Oh and the current layout is only an initial effort, it'll get revisited later.

Text updates and Return Flight Prompt revisited

Updated various texts around the site to be more descriptive.
In particular the older Home Page did not give a complete summary of Impulsifly. We know most visitors wouldn't even notice there were words on the home page :) But we would like to give good information to those who happen to cast a glance (it's our 2 second pitch).

Another area that got a major revamp is the faq section. We have added alot of good information (and a huge thankyou for asking lots of good questions!)

Finally, we revisited the prompt that informs users how to bring up return flights. The old text prompt was too dissociated from the data table, so we have brought it down to fill up the space in the corner of the table.

Google Analytics

Added - unfortunately I cant share the report site (have to add users one by one). But I'll post graphs here from time to time.

We are open!

At... http://impulsifly.com.au

I am smiling as I type this, it's a wonderful feeling. Ofcourse now the real work begins. We have just taken the first step to a long and hopefully fulfilling road, it has certainly been great fun so far!

Rapid Deployment

Firstly, some minor update to UI:
- autoscroll to make the expanded return flights row visible if it is hidden.
- fixed a small calculation bug that sometimes thinks the top row shouldn't be visible.

And I have also cleaned up application resource management, to make redeployment easier. There is still a lot that can be improved, but I think we have made a step in the right direction - because improvements to the application are only realized when they are being used.

Toyota makes about a million improvements/innovations a year. Yahoo updates their infrastructure three times a day. So we are going to try to make our processes thrive on change as well :)

Click Clack Front n Back

Added more cues to suggest clicking on the destinations will yield return flights.

This has been a bit of a recurring theme where users did not discover the return flight function. Hopefully the new visual cues will address it.

On the backend, we have reconfigured the service to send compressed data across the wire. This reduces the transfer size by a factor of 10, so it would improve response time (shorten that initial loading message) and preserve precious traffic quota. Each page visit now amounts to about 100kb for a new user, and less than 30kb for a returning user.

Deployment #2

Completed porting Impulsifly into a distributed architecture.

The data gathering side sits on a server with unlimited bandwidth (hostjava.net, these guys are economical - but have bad support and performance).

Whilst the client facing end stays with Metawerx which offers excellent support and performance, but is on the stingy end with traffic quota.

This way, we can run intensive data gathers without compromise on performance - it does
increase our hosting cost by about $9.00 a month though... buuuuut hey i spend that much on cr@ppy food court lunches anyway.

Time to Delivery

Went to the Sun seminar at Darling Harbor today, and amongst various things (including an excellent presentation by James Gosling) one of the points that really struck home was the focus on 'Time to Delivery'. To keep VCs interested, you need to deliver something in 3 months. Because that is how long your first round of funding is going to last. You will then get another 3 months after that.