Since October, Google introduce a clause in their usage terms that states that if you do go over 25000 user sessions a day then they can start charging you a fee for use. Not such a big deal some may say and Google did note in their developer blog…

Based on current usage, only the top 0.35% of sites will be affected by these limits, meaning that the Google Maps API will remain free for the vast majority of sites.

— Google Developer Blog

On the usage statics from a post last year on their blog that means 1225 sites will be affected (probably more).

One of our sites, World Airport Codes, is one of those sites. I suppose it’s nice to be thought of as one of the 0.35%, but not so good that the costs of using Google Maps on this particular site would be more than it earns in advertising revenue.

So our search for a replacement started!

There are a number of solutions out there that still offer a free service, you just have to look and take into account that they may not have as much functionality as Google Maps offer and a different library to work from, but with a little work and some real thought, they can be just as good, if not better.

Our solution for World Airport Codes was two fold; a Javascript map API and a map tile service.

Javascript Map API

For the Javascript map API we went with CloudMade’s Leaflet as it’s lightweight, simple and open source. It’s also one of the nicest looking APIs out of the box both looks-wise with the navigation being very simple and contemporary and it’s implementation Javascript giving Google a run for it’s money. The only issue on the initial use of Leaflet, for us, was that they do charge for commercial use of their map tiles, so we had to have a look at a different map tile provider; which Leaflet makes very easy to implement just by changing one URL.

Map Tile Service

The most popular source of map tile data out there is OpenStreetMap; we also found that, in some places, it’s updated more frequently than Google Maps thanks to the open community that a few of us at Fubra have already contributed too. The issue we did file with using OpenStreetMap tiles directly was that of a shallow one; they’re just not that pretty…

Open MapQuest uses data from OpenStreetMap but adds it’s own style to the maps that we think looks better than Google’s. And the other thing is it’s free! Open MapQuest ask that if you are going to load more than 4000 tiles per second then to email them with your estimated usage. This, I believe, is to do with making sure their servers can cope and that your not going to be a resource hog. On top of that you must include a snippet linking back to them saying they have provided the map tiles.

They do look great and provide a level extra level of information missing from Google Maps such as coastal boarders, a relief map and airport runways (helpful for World Airport Codes).

Putting it Together

If you want to use Open MapQuest tiles in Leaflet then all you need do is change theses lines of code:

var cloudmadeUrl = 'http://{s}.tile.cloudmade.com/YOUR-API-KEY/997/256/{z}/{x}/{y}.png',
    cloudmadeAttrib = 'Map data © 2011 OpenStreetMap contributors, Imagery © 2011 CloudMade',
    cloudmade = new L.TileLayer(cloudmadeUrl, {maxZoom: 18, attribution: cloudmadeAttrib});

To something like this:

var	cloudmadeUrl = 'http://{s}.mqcdn.com/tiles/1.0.0/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}.png',
	subDomains = ['otile1','otile2','otile3','otile4'],
	cloudmadeAttrib = 'Data, imagery and map information provided by <a href="http://open.mapquest.co.uk" target="_blank">MapQuest</a>, <a href="http://www.openstreetmap.org/" target="_blank">OpenStreetMap</a> and contributors, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/" target="_blank">CC-BY-SA</a>';

var cloudmade = new L.TileLayer(cloudmadeUrl, {maxZoom: 18, attribution: cloudmadeAttrib, subdomains: subDomains});

What we are changing here is the attribution text (which is longer) and adding the new URL to grab the map tiles from and setting an array of sub-domains for faster loading. That’s it really.

We now have a map that used to look like this previously with Google:

Our Google Maps previously

But now with Leaflet and Open MapQuest it looks like this:

Now with Leaflet and Open MapQuest implimented

If you want to learn more about working with Leaflet then check out their documentation page and for more on using Open MapQuest tiles as well as other services then head over to the developer page for that.

Other solutions

Our solution for World Airport Codes works perfectly for what we want it for but others may want more, or just want to check out other mapping solutions. Here’s a list of those alternative solutions for Google Maps and notes we have taken in regards to their usage (in no particular order):

• Ovi Maps – Yahoo! now use them for their mapping solution, but there is a clause in their terms that says usage “may be or may become subject to charges” (see point 9)
  
  

  Ovi Maps

• OpenLayers – a completely open source project from Open Source Geospatial Foundation released under the FreeBSD license
  
  

  OpenLayers

• OS OpenSpace – a mapping API project developed by Ordnance Survey, but only UK mapping data is available and you are limited to loading 65000 map tiles a day
  
  

  OS OpenSpace

• Bing – the main competitor to Google but comes with more restrictive usage of “125,000 sessions or 500,000 transactions in a 12 month period”
  
  

  Bing Maps

• MapQuest – I’ve already spoke about them, but they do provide their own APIs to use and have the best license info we found
  
  

  MapQuest

Hopefully that will help provide more ideas for using something other than Google Maps for your web app. If you have any other alternative solutions then please feel free to leave a comment!

Marble Solar is a new business dedicated to the design and build of commercial and residential solar power panel systems. It is a collaboration between Fubra Limited and the directors of the Marble Group, a construction firm we have invested in.

Working with our friends at Bytewire over the past 2 months we have built, what I believe to be, one of the best solar PV estimation tools available online.

Step 1a – Enter your postcode

Step 1b – Draw your roof

Step 2 – View estimated income

Step 3 – Book a survey appointment

The estimator allows you to draw an outline of your roof on Google Maps, and select the orientation. It will then propose a suitably sized system for your roof, and uses either SAP 2005, or NASA solar irradiation data along with panel efficiency information to estimate the amount of electricity you could generate from the system over the course of the year. This data is combined with financial data such as Feed In Tariff rates and some assumptions on future price inflation to give you a projection of the amount of income and savings the system may generate over it’s lifetime.

For me, it’s great to see what our network of small companies can achieve when we work together.

Last week he took his PHP 5.3 Zend exam and passed, which now makes him a Zend Certified Engineer. Ollie’s 16th birthday is not until the end of July, so at just 15 years old I think he must be one of the Youngest Zend Engineers in the world. Do you know anyone younger? If so, leave us a comment.

We offer several partnership options to sellers, but the one I’ll talk about here is where we sell their home furnishings directly from furnish.co.uk, just like a marketplace. For example, a customer finds a coffee table on furnish.co.uk from a particular seller, adds it to their basket, checks out and pays, all without visiting the seller’s own website. The seller is notified of this and dispatches the coffee table to the customer. We take a commission on the sale.

A legal minefield
Technically, this is relatively simple. But it’s a legal minefield if done the wrong way. Any business that takes payment for goods becomes accountable under the Sale of Goods Act 1979, Distance Selling Regulations, etc. Several websites such as Not On the Highstreet appear to do precisely this with home furnishings; they take payment from the customer, pay the seller a proportion of this and keep the rest. They then attempt to contract out of their statutory obligations in their terms and conditions, insisting that it is in fact the seller who is liable in the event of problems. However, in my view and that of my solicitor, if this were ever legally challenged, it would fail. Legislation to protect consumers cannot be ousted by private agreement. It’s the equivalent of those shops who put a “No Refunds” sign in the window. The situation is that, like it or not, if a company accepts payment for goods, there’s a whole load of legal baggage that comes with that. In the eye of the law, they’re a retailer and there is nothing they can do to change this.

Paying the seller, not us
The only way to remove legal liability is for the customer not to pay us at all. They must pay the seller, who then quite rightly takes on the legal burden, and we charge the seller our commission afterwards. For this to work transparently, we need to perform some technical magic such that (1) the customer’s user experience of paying feels normal and natural, even though they’re paying the seller rather than us and (2) the whole process is automated, so we don’t need to get involved in manual invoicing and placing orders for home furnishings with sellers. In this way, it feels almost identical to if the customer paid us directly, except we avoid any legal liability. We do this as follows.

Paypal API
Every seller that comes on board must set up a dedicated Paypal account. If, say, a customer buys some modern furniture on furnish.co.uk and checks out, they’re taken to the seller’s Paypal page, not ours. The customer feels comfortable with this, as they just see a Paypal page. Nothing abnormal there. As far as the customer is concerned, their work is now done. But there’s more to the technical process.

The seller’s Paypal account is configured such that furnish.co.uk gets an automatic notification through the Paypal API when a purchase takes place. This information is then automatically processed, the commission due calculated and a tally kept of commission due for each seller. Because we can also automatically monitor payments made to our own Paypal account and by who, we also know when a seller has paid us our commission. So we can calculate the total a seller owes us by taking the commission owed from all sales and subtracting from it the total paid to us. The seller is automatically emailed regularly with the outstanding balance. The email to the seller contains a link that directly opens Paypal on a page ready to transfer the sum owed into the Paypal account of Furnish.co.uk. The seller simply needs to click a confirmation to make the transfer; it couldn’t be easier for them.

In the event the seller doesn’t pay within the allocated time, we have some powerful options available. We could remove the seller from Furnish, thus cutting off their income from any furniture sales on furnish.co.uk, or even contact the customer, so it’s simply not worth it for a seller to act dishonestly. An added beauty is that a seller is welcome to top up their payments to us at any time to avoid any risk of underpayment, just like topping up your mobile phone credit.

Ensuring automatic notifications happen
A flaw in the plan is that a seller *could* secretly switch off the automatic notifications from their Paypal account such that furnish.co.uk thinks that no sales are happening when they actually are. There’s an answer here too, which we’ll be implementing shortly. Every few days or weeks, we’ll automatically make a random payment of just a few pence to each seller’s Paypal account. If their notifications are set up correctly, we’ll be notified of the payment we made and we’ll just reduce the amount owed by that seller by the few pence we transferred. But in the event we don’t get notified of the payment we made, we’ll know that the seller has switched off the automatic notifications, and we can then deal with this accordingly.

I should mention that all of the above functionality is presently in development, but it’s looking good. I’ll let you know how it goes in a future post.

We have set out our stall at the Graduate fair and, for our first attempt, we’re very pleased.  If you’re a student and are thinking of attending the event drop by and have a chat.

Fubra is on the hunt for content writers, marketing experts, project managers and in particular developers, to help us continue to grow and invest in the future. The only requirements are that they are highly motivated, ready for a challenge, and well suited to our friendly, supportive working environment.

You can find the Fubra stand in the Austin Pearce Building on the University of Surrey campus and we will be available to chat from 2pm to 5.30pm. For the more technically minded we’ll have developer quizes ready for you to rate your skills. Alternatively come and chat to our friendly marketing and content team about the great opportunities in a non-technical role.

Take a look at the benefits of becoming a Fubra employee…

• Flexible working hours
• Casual dress code
• Chill out room with XBOX 360 and cinema
• Free gym on site with unlimited access
• Awesome social events
• Generous funding for training and books
• Up to 10% company pension contributions
• Excellent profit share scheme
• Free bike – Cycle to work scheme
• Free on site car parking
• Your choice of Mac, PC or Linux
• Friendly, supportive working environment

If you’re unable to attend the fair but you still want to get in touch about the opportunities at Fubra then take a look at our careers page, or email paul@fubra.com.

The costume arrived, and on Monday 14th March, Nick came into work fully prepared (beard trimmed, hair in the style of Riker, facial expression toned and polished) and we handed over the costume, with instructions to make sure it got a lot of exposure. Take a look at the resemblance below. During the week Nick reluctantly willingly took part in the many embarrassing challenges we set for him, including  a trip to the bakery and into town. It turned out that people in Aldershot didn’t really bat an eyelid at the fact he was dressed as a Star Trek enthusiast!

Nick managed to raise £145 for Comic Relief – Well done Nick

Next on our agenda was getting the rest of the company involved. Seeing as we have an in house gym, we decided to take full advantage of it and organise an exercise-a-thon spanning over 9 hours. This involved us each taking part in a 30 minute cycle and 3, 10 minute stints on the rowing machine. Not only a great way to exercise but a way to take your mind off work for a while and get the endorphins flowing ensuring an even happier team!

The starting gun went and we all pedalled and rowed as much as we could being sure to keep track of how far we managed to get. As a company we covered 110 miles on the bike and over 57000 metres on the rowing machine, the equivalent of 2 London to Brighton bike rides and rowing from central London to the mouth of the River Thames.

As a few extras our Product & Marketing specialists Hannah Bird and Annie McLoughlin cooked up a storm to keep all the exercisers going, making ‘Red Nose Day’ themed cupcakes, cookies and a cheesecake. These were available for a small donation, and turned out to be very popular in the afternoon during the exercise for staff who needed a quick sugar injection. Combining the cakes, with the exercise-a-thon, pick a pose sweepstake and Nick’s Riker challenge we managed to raise over £350 for Comic Relief. A big thanks to everyone who took part. Any ideas for next year are very welcome!

AffJet = Better Affiliate Analysis

AffJet’s slogan summarises what AffJet is in three short words which is targeted at it’s market, but for those of you who don’t know what affiliate analysis refers to, here’s a quick introduction.

Affiliate marketing is a great way for websites to make money from their content and essentially, the process goes like this:

Site A displays links to Site B within their content, using a tracked or “affiliate link”. Every time a user on Site A clicks that affiliate link and performs a desired action on Site B (buys something, signs up for a service etc…), Site B gives Site A some commission as a little thank you!

This process works at it’s best when Site A and Site B are highly related to each other and, because the sales are tracked, Site B only pays for the desired actions when they happen. This differs with traditional display advertising, used online and offline, because as an advertiser you pay for all your advertising regardless of whether you receive any desired actions from it. For this reason it has taken off really well and is used by many websites across the world wide web.

Affiliate marketing uses intermediary software providers called affiliate networks who provide a platform which connects Advertisers and Publishers (aka Merchants and Affiliates). Affiliate networks allow relationships between these two parties to be built, agreements to be put in place and actions to be tracked and they also supply reporting for their merchants and affiliates.

Where does AffJet come in?

The problem with the current affiliate marketing system is that there are many affiliate networks each with lots of merchants and affiliates on their systems. As an affiliate, logging into each of these affiliate networks to find out how your websites are performing can be really time consuming, and creating reports to combine all of the data together really does take a long time.

This makes effective analysis of your data a much more daunting task than it needs to be.

AffJet provides a solution which aggregates all the data held by affiliate networks into one place. This allows affiliates to log into one place to find out how their websites are performing and saves loads of time.

What can affiliate marketers do on AffJet?

As an affiliate, you can take advantage of many useful, comprehensive and varied features within AffJet including:

• Custom Projects to allow grouping of links from any website, network or merchant
• Custom dashboards to allow you to see the metrics you want to see upon logging in
• Automatic import every night, we take the load on our servers to save your computer coping with an import
• Highly secured protection for your data, and regular back ups meaning you won’t lose out if your computer gives up
• Access your data from anywhere with an internet connection
• Allow yourself to act on the crucial difference between viewing your data and analysing it

The interface, design and features make AffJet simple to use and allow you to retrieve affiliate data and statistics quickly and simply, giving you back more time to spend on analysing and acting on the trends you have observed.

What direction is AffJet moving in now?

We are working hard on adding new affiliate networks (for greater coverage) and also new features into AffJet at the moment. A lot of these changes are being brought about by real user feedback as we want to make sure that we work on things that will make a real difference to affiliates daily work load.

We currently have a launch competition running, where affiliates using AffJet have a great chance to win an iPad regardless of their size. This competition will start when we have 50 users on AffJet and we are hoping to get a lot of feedback from these users that can help us make AffJet even better. You can read more about the AffJet iPad competition here.

Did I mention Affjet is free to use while we are in our beta testing stage?!

You can keep updated with what is going on with AffJet by following us on our AffJet Twitter account

Following on from our first decade of trading we find ourselves in an exciting place where we are not just helping to drive our own business growth, but also working closely with start-up companies, and investments we have made, to help them grow too. I’m confident there will be a lot more to learn as we apply what we have already learned, and we are certainly not short of challenges and great ideas.

When I set out to build Fubra, I had something to prove to other people. Some of those people had doubted me, but equally, others had believed in me. However, over time I realised this goal was not making me happy. My Dad, Paul and I have discussed at some length what we would like Fubra to do and stand for.

We have come up with 66 words which represent what we are going to do. What’s nice about them, for me, is that they are based on what we have most enjoyed doing at Fubra, and together I think they represent well, what we have built.

Others might call this a mission statement, but I prefer to call it “66 words”

Embrace change and seek long term growth by building radical, disruptive technologies.

Create excitement for our team, customers and suppliers by valuing curiosity, creativity and ambition.

Respect our customers by listening carefully to them and precisely understanding their needs.

Promote awareness by creating new interfaces for information that was previously difficult to access.

Invest our surplus resources equitably, with long term partners who share our values.

I couldn’t be more excited about having taken the time to think about our goals as a business, and codify them like this. It has taken us time to get round to it, but it’s a great feeling now we are here.

Having recently discovered the need to fully customise the permalink for an individual post or page, due to some inconsistencies when migrating a site into WordPress.

We also came across a number of pages on an exiting site with very poorly formatted urls, so these needed to be modified but still redirect the old url to the new location.

The ability to globally modify the page permalink structure in a similar way to how the custom permalink structure works for posts was also required, allowing for the addition of a parent directory and file extension.

In order to tackle these issues, we were previously using an existing plugin for the permalink customisation and a draft version of our permalink alias plugin, so required the addition of yet another plugin to handle the page structure modification.

Instead of creating the third, it was decided that a singular plugin would be created to provide a solution to all the problems we were having, so began work on the Permalink Editor plugin.

This approach allowed us to:

• Centralise the permalink redirection, helping to prevent any redirection conflicts between the various plugins in use.
• Improve the functionality of the old plugins that were previously in use.
• Reduce the code required by three separate plugins by reusing functionality.
• Create a plugin that worked exactly how we required it to.

Although still in the early stages of release and subject to further testing, it’s progressing well so far and already has one or two feature requests up for consideration.

Having received very little feedback from the 190+ downloads and a handful of reviews so far, we can only assume that it is working correctly and people are finding it to be a useful addition to their plugin collections.

To find out more or download the Permalink Editor, visit the WordPress Plugin Directory or install it via your WordPress install admin area (Plugins > Add New).