VashonMap and MapMate

With help from some talented programmers, I have developed two web services: VashonMap.com and MapMate.com.

VashonMap.com is a map-based directory of Vashon Island, Washington, USA, conceived in the May 2004 and launched with $150 out of my pocket. Eschewing the impersonality of MapQuest-ish street maps or Google-ish satellite imagery, I decided I wanted a homegrown, hand-drawn look to the maps for VashonMap.com, so I put a call out to the local artistic community in search of an illustrator. I was blessed to get connected with extremely talented Vashon native Annie Brule, and a long-term partnership was formed. Annie’s drawings of Vashon Island for VashonMap.com have become treasured local assets and will soon be available in poster form.

Buoyed by brisk subscription sales to local merchants that summer, the first version of VashonMap.com hit the web in September 2004, four months after its conception.

The first iteration of the site was crude, lacking a database and a simple maintenance interface for me to operate, thus tying me to my programmer every time a simple change was needed. So in the Spring of 2005 I hired uber-developer John Fieber to re-work the site. John’s marching orders were to “work himself out of a job,” to build a simple maintenance interface by which a low-skilled person (such as myself) could maintain the site.

John delivered beautifully, crafting a site that was not only easy but fun to maintain, and the current version of VashonMap.com was launched in August 2005.

Inspired by the elegance of the administrative map-building interface that John built, I realized that such a simple “hyperimage” creation tool could be a very powerful and useful product to offer to the general public. Imagine: a simple, turnkey web service whereby the average person can build their own interactive imagery. Not just maps but floorplans, diagrams, photographs, most (we estimate 80% of) web pages, group photos, mechanical drawings, anatomical charts, many, many things can be assembled in a simple graphics program such as Powerpoint, saved as a jpg, and converted to a hyperimage web page with MapMate. MapMate can even enable a peculiar conception like Landmates.net to be easily created from a set of Powerpoint slides.

For more MapMate examples, see the featured sites page.

To the newborn MapMate project came maverick programmer Chadwick Dahlquist in March 2006. Chadwick proposed developing MapMate in the cutting-edge Ruby on Rails development platform.

The beta version of the MapMate service was released in the beginning of August 2007. Safari compatibility and “smart” callouts arrived in June 2008. We tried it out on people for free for the remainder of the year, and we billed (and got paid by) our first customer in December.

MapMate has big plans for 2009.