12/28/15

SNAPSPANS.COM must be spanned!

I must say the organizational and time management habits that contribute to a popular blog are roughly absent in the lack of updates here, but I have so many accounts online, I cycle in a large orbit through them, and sometimes find a tighter loop. That's why SNAPSPAN'S bridges in a snap the workflow integration problem. It is surprisingly but elegantly simple. Incentively so.

9/12/10

Snapspans Running Fine

Snapspans.com has been running for three years. While looking to expand, the static offering is currently stable.

12/11/08

Autopilot Local Classifieds, Yellow Pages, Business Listings

Snapspans.com is an operational, useful, lightweight, and accessible yellow pages/listings service. More complex plans are on hold while other projects (projected below) compete for development time.

5/6/08

Snapspans Summer Preview

Snapspans.com will be rolling in new automated features for listing updates, targeted local and industry advertising, new locations and industries, and a community feedback, news and discussion interface and link recommendation engine.

See it online by June 21st.

1/15/08

Small Business Advertiser Services

Snapspans has begun 2008 on a strong initial three months of simple, useful information, friendly, prompt and helpful service, and well tailored search results and commercial links.

Starting next month, a simplified method for businesses to post descriptive information and add to their listing content, as well as receive premium placement, site links and contacts, will go live for a very low price.

Snapspans receives about 30,000 visitors per month, and with new content, new link partners, and stronger search matching, traffic will grow smoothly and steadily.

Small Business Advertising is now a simple email exchange and $40.00 annually. Get it locked in now!

12/17/07

ReResolution

Zip code resolution is not good, who would have thought--it is just more useful to show metropolitan listings together, sorted by town, but with no separate page for smaller regions.

Added a category for boating and marine businesses.

Working to create a community of resources, and a local network across partner sites.

12/13/07

Local Advertising: Links, Banners Marketing Targets

Snapspans is going strong, and now offering local advertisers in many businesses the chance to build their brand awareness, customer/client base and marketing portfolios.

http://www.snapspans.com/advertising/

10/30/07

Resolution

Continuing current progress in processing data. Zip code geographical resolution is available. It helps to narrow down results pages. A simple improvement.

Accumulating a lot of raw information behind the scenes. There are amazing Creative Commons and Public Domain resources. Putting it into a new form, and using this information in powerful new combinations, is the immediate plan. A lot more is on the way.

10/24/07

Development Report

Snapspans is continuing to grow. For the time being, subject pages have been routed to the home page. They did not meet the usefulness bar as they were set up, so development is underway to gather public domain content and enable community development and feedback. In the pipeline is a simple forum and wiki interface. With the traffic we are getting, some careful filters will need to be developed beforehand.

Also in the works:
* refined results for better city resolution: zipcode, street, geocoded proximity
* detailed city information
* built in search for listed businesses websites--we would like to do more for our people
* partnerships with specialized vertical web publishers
* some craigslist integration--their coverage and access to be users is powerful and developed, we would like to link to each site for our users, and if it will fit within the CL-TOU, provide some data mining and sorting for our users

These and about nine other things sum it up.

10/18/07

Snapspans Progress Report

Snapspans development continues this week with:
  • layout and navigation streamlining, removed extraneous links, set city main pages as single go-between for listings--users are arriving, finding what they need on a page, and moving through
  • caching data to static files as requested, to raise overhead on MySQL for background data processing, sorting, extraction and refining
  • offline architecture and strategy
We are looking for higher bandwidth hosting services, possibly MediaTemple or another with a DB focus, and preparing source and data for a clean install.
(Version 1.2.2)

10/15/07

Monday Fun

Roughly implemented geocoding and wikipedia entries for major cities, and page caching to improve response times and save my database for more inportant things.

Traffic is coming up, and we hope everybody is finding what they're looking for, or at least getting some clues. Let us know here with a comment if you have a feature request.

Thanks to GeoNames. Click their link to find out why.

10/14/07

New Development Roadmap

Data resources
When a page is requested, we populate the page with content and links, with any new links and content merged into the page database entry.

Interact
Comments made will be posted with lnks to profiles based on encrypted unique email addresses.

Profiles
Profiles enable users to benefit from Snapspans visibility. The profile may be edited with login, to add the posters links to documents and sites (the user's email, name or domain name is in the linked documents' content, whois information, etc)

Maps and City Data
These should be populated when requested from most recent public domain Census, Labor and geocoding data.

10/13/07

Snapspans Utility

Snapspans has just begun, so volatility in traffic is a minor concern. The drive behind Snapspans is not to run traffic and provide useful ads, though that is going very well. Though that is the vehicle, Snapspans is a positive force and concerned with being useful and engaging.

The next phase of Snapspans includes two parts beyond the database and advertiser placements.

1. Interactivity.

Snapspans will feature a minimal, lightweight wiki system to generate content, reviews and discussion.
By bypassing such methods such as forums, blogs and profiles, Snapspans will provide rich features, while not competing with much more powerful and developed services. (Facebook, Google, Technorati, etc--these are by far sufficient.)

2. Linking out.

A lot of our traffic comes from weblogs and comments on Snapspans subdomain-related content. First we'll try putting an auto-link back to the referrers, and keeping a list of them in the databases.
Better citizens make better business.

Ciao.

10/12/07

Contact page, More Data, Improved Navigation

Today we added a contact page for user feedback. It also makes it much simpler for advertisers to get in touch.

Found a lot more data and split up what we have into more open search categories. Zip code, neighborhood, that sort of thing. Google's own local search (type your zip into the google bar) is better, but some people will find us now who would not have.

The navigation is shuffled out a little. The layout was too wide for some screen depths, and now it should fit nicely for most everyone. Each page is now within two clicks from every other, which is an improvement in a few cases.

Next up--creating and tagging new pages.

10/11/07

Progress and Plans

Before anything else, it is important to make out of some of the guiding motivations behind he Snapspans project. Snapspans.com is a new way to link things together. Inspired by the Open Directory Project, Wikipedia, the blog networks and Google organizing the world's information, Snapspans intends to automatically coordinate diverse subjects.

Transparent free market complex systems are beautiful gardens.

Snapspans began as a development platform for a variety of experimental scripts. These include a wiki, data analysis functions, rapid application development and web gadgets like survey generators and cooperative sorting.

Many of these have been created as businesses under so many names and companies. Snapspans becomes the heir of all of this source code, and its public visage.

Into the fold

Technorati can count snapspans.blogspot as existing Technorati Profile

Subjects on Snapspans

Snapspans Instructions

Instructions and Explanations for Various Features

how to use
! type http://www.snapspans.com/(your query) and go! 1. select a city
2. select a category
3. make use of the (usually) very useful Google ad links on each page
3a. or use the Google powered search box on each page
4. scroll down or use your browser's find tool to get your data

Outgoing Links
Please enter your useful, relevant links to quality sites. We run all outgoing urls through a blacklist checker and an exit page, but we rely on your best judgement.

Advertiser Links
Advertiser links are available by location or subject. If you would like to suggest a category that fits your business, (and it does not yet exist--check first), please go ahead and do so, for the sake of those who come after.

About Snapspans read the FAQ
This is a site which provides both data research services and reference information. Additional applications and tools are being developed behind the scenes, over and across the current sitemap.
Please feel free to use the public resources or to request anything else which is of interest to your requirements or the general public.
Snapspans currently provides static business contact and location listings for 50 major US markets. This seed information is unadorned and limited in interactivity. Other networks and classifications are on the way.

Snapspans Frequently Asked Questions

Snapspans now has a list of frequently asked questions.

Please comment below with any that haven't been answered.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Snapspans for?
Snapspans is for you and me, and everyone else. People, companies, buyers, sellers, writers, web publishers, cats, or whomever is online.

What can Snapspans do for me?
You will find a way to do what you want to with Snapspans. If the free form tools for any reason do not suit your task, please post your requests or goal here.

What kinds of tools does Snapspans offer?
Snapspans provides a thorough search, listings and information platform with a lot of help from Google's incredible web programming tools.

What does Snapspans cost?
What is your budget? Snapspans is free for browsing, posting, and connecting. Advertisers and links range from $5.00 one time setup (which may be waived) to custom built solutions to drive you motivated traffic. Mid six figure M&A offers entertained as well.

Why is Snapspans open to everyone?
Because everyone is open to Snapspans. Ours is a give some and get more policy. It has worked for thousands of generations of fun-loving mammals.

Why do I see Google ads on every page?
Good question! Why is Google's stock price 8x what it was a little while ago? It is a mystery to us how millions of networked commodity PCs can comprehend exactly what we are looking for. Snapspans was born out of the observation that the ads Google provides are genuinely useful. Of course if you see something you like, click it. Snapspans will welcome you when you come back.

When will feature X be available?
When date Y crosses the Greenwich Meridian. Time is valuable, and Snapspans likes simple. But let us know what you need in the forums. Feel free to contribute also, if wou would like to extend Snapspans.

When does a new listing, comment or article appear?
Within 72 hours for unregisterd users, almost immediately for members. Snapspans premium members have the first look. Before anything is displayed for the entire Universe, members have the ability to cheer or boo public content, or even veto it entirely, and that is real power. Members are not permitted to edit or alter any entries, so submit what you feel is the best for your intentions and don't worry about it. You can also become a member if you like. It's easy.

Where can I find my town?
We started Snapspans pages for 50 major US cities. You know your area better than we do. So fill in the gap by seeding your location. Every time someone takes an interest in a place, Snapspans grows.

How can I become a member?

How can I advertise my business?

How can I advertise if I don't have a website?

How does Snapspans work?

How does Snapspans make money?

Who is behind Snapspans?
We are a small, but tightly knit group of about ten fingers. We have the advantage of some very powerful tools and the cutting edge networks of the century of super computing to make it all handy for you.