Planaroo Blog

Planaroo at 30 (days, that is)

Planaroo.com launched in beta form 30 days ago today, and we're about to drop the "beta" designator.  I thought it might be interesting to share some of the things we've learned so far.

1. Traffic is growing organically through search
   The numbers are small because the site started from zero, but traffic is growing quickly -- about 10% a day on average.  Sundays and Mondays are heavy traffic days.  Fridays are dead. 
2. Google sends the most traffic, but Microsoft performs far better than anticipated
   80% of traffic to Planaroo from search engines comes from Google, and the other 20% comes from Microsoft's Live or MSN search.  Google has indexed 287 out of 831 pages in the sitemap, and almost all of the non-indexed pages are photo pages without content.  Microsoft has indexed 177 pages as of 8/1/08. seems to have indexed most of the content too, but they don't provide specific information on indexed page counts.
3. The original content strategy is working
   Creating so much content was difficult and time-consuming, but it seems to be paying off.  The site is doing unexpectedly well on search queries for terms like parking, directions, and ride height requirements. We're even on the first page of search results for some search terms.  I didn't expect that so quickly, especially with no links to the site.
4. Yahoo is missing...
   There is no traffic from Yahoo, despite the fact that their spider (named Slurp) has visited the site countless times.  Planaroo content pages are not showing up in Yahoo search results at all, so I assume that either their indexing is exceptionally slow compared to Google and Microsoft, or I've done something to piss them off.  (I have friends there... maybe one is secretly mad at me.) Hopefully this will resolve itself soon.
5. Over 64% of Planaroo.com traffic in July was on Firefox
   This striking number is almost certainly because of a blog post I wrote about Amazon's S3 service that created huge traffic numbers on July 21 (which I factor out in the overall growth rate).  The programmers who found that post on Hacker News tend to use Firefox on Macs, but that's still a huge number.  25% of visitors are using IE, and 9% are on Safari.
6. The UK is sending close to 20% of Planaroo's traffic
   The weak dollar makes an Orlando vacation much more affordable for our friends in the UK, and it shows in my traffic stats.
7. People are not visiting photo pages as often as expected
   This surprises me.  My friends and I spent a lot of time (not to mention money) taking photos for the site, but users are simply not clicking through to see the larger versions of the thumbnails or the gallery of images.  I'm not sure if that's because the thumbnails are big enough to get the point across, or if it's not clear that the images can be clicked, or if people are just more interested in the text.  It won't stop me from adding more photos, but it's something to keep a close eye on.

It will be very interesting to see how the Las Vegas content (coming very soon) changes things because it will be the first time that hotels and restaurants are part of the content mix.

Thanks to everyone who has helped Planaroo get to this point.  Special thanks to Jen, Steve, Pat, Charles, David, Caryn, Stella, my mom, and Art.

Responding to Amazon's S3 outage

Today's S3 outage has disrupted a lot of major web sites today including Twitter and SmugMug, both of which rely on S3 to host photos and/or icons.  The service is coming back online now, but it's been down for almost 7 hours total.

We host all of our photos at Amazon S3, but as a new site with low (but growing) traffic levels Planaroo obviously won't feel the impact that these major sites will.  However, we're optimistic that Planaroo.com will be a big site one day so it's interesting to think of ways to prevent bad things from happening.

Here are the lessons we're taking away from today's problems:

• Backups are a good thing. The one thing we did right was to keep current backups of the photos we host on S3.  That allowed us to manually replace the URL in our photos database table with a new URL quickly and easily. 
• Fix it. Don't hope for the best.  S3 went down at 9:06 am Pacific, and we had photos up and running by around noon.  We didn't do anything for two hours because we though -- incorrectly -- that the system would probably come back up quickly.  That was a mistake.
• Keep backups up-to-date and ready-to-go. Planaroo is based in a private home at the moment, and we depend on our Comcast connection to upload files to our servers at Slicehost.  Normally that's not a problem since the entire code base is small, but Planaroo has well over 1000 photos, and we store small (225x315) and large (500x700) versions of each one on the server.  Comcast's upstream speeds are slow, and they throttle down after the first few MB are uploaded.  It took over an hour to upload all the photos, and that's just not acceptable.  In the future we'll keep a backup ready to go in the event that Amazon S3 goes down, and we'll automate the switchover process.  We'll also think about seeking out a faster upstream solution.
• We were right not to host critical CSS, JavaScript, or icons on S3.  It's bad enough to serve broken photos, but broken CSS or JavaScript files can render a site unusable.
• Google's AJAX Libraries could go down, too.  We're using Google's AJAX Libraries API to serve the prototype.js file.  Google could have a similar downtime, and we need a failover plan for that too.

We would like to hear what other small startups are going in response to today's problems.

New! Checklists and Site Search

Three major features launched today:

1. Attraction checklists show all attractions in each park, with the average user rating, height requirements, fastpass and single-rider line availability, duration, wheelchair advisories, and medical advisories. This feature is now available for the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney's Hollywood Studios, and Disney's Animal Kingdom.
2. Site search is now available via a Google Custom Search box in the upper-right corner of each Planaroo page.  It will take a couple of days before all the content is indexed, but it should allow users to get to what they're looking for quickly.  This search only searches Planaroo pages.
3. Dynamic sitemaps launched today.  This feature is invisible to users, but critical to search engines. (You can see the sitemap in XML format at http://planaroo.com/sitemap.xml if you're curious.)  Sitemaps help search engines to a better job of indexing the site, and making it dynamic means that I don't have to update it every time there's a change to the site.

The database changes I discussed in yesterday's post are still in holding until I can figure out what's wrong.  I'll try it again late tonight.

Traffic surged 5x yesterday after I added some Planaroo pages to StumbleUpon.  It looks like it's down today, but still 3x higher than it was before the StumbleUpon posts.

I got the smackdown today from MousePlanet.  I posted some links to Planaroo on their message boards. (The content was relevant, and not particularly competitive.)  The moderator asked me not to do it again, but they were nice about it and even left the original post up.

Monday night and all is weird

Today's changes
Most of today's changes are designed to speed up the site and to reduce load on the web server. (I'm not having any problems with it, but there's no point in forcing users to download 150K of unused JavaScript.)

• Edited text for several attractions. (Will be visible with next database rollout.)
• Added ALT, HEIGHT, and WIDTH tags to all photos.
• Removed the unused 'throughout the park' sections from Animal Kingdom, Epcot, and Studios pages. (Will be visible with next database rollout.)
• Edited text for wheelchair advisories on attractions pages.
• Added a flag icon to make height requirements more visible.
• Eliminated unnecessary JavaScript files.
• Serving the Prototype.js file from Google's AJAX Libraries API to improve speed.
• Added visible latitude and longitude information to the Park maps pages. (User request.)
• Added StumbleUpon links.
• Created an admin tool to calculate average rooview ratings.

Good news, everyone!
Planaroo is starting to get some traffic from Microsoft's Live search (MSN) today, and there were also a few random queries coming in through Google.  (Still nothing from Yahoo.)

I added a few Planaroo pages to StumbleUpon today and saw an immediate traffic spike.  (Small, but still interesting.)  After seeing that, I decided to add StumbleUpon links to Planaroo.  I know several great people at StumbleUpon from my time at eBay (eBay bought SU shortly after I left the company),but I'm embarrassed to say this is my first time using the product in any depth.  It's pretty cool, actually.

Database weirdness
I tried to roll out a new version of the database with several non-critical edits, but the same table that works fine on my development machine didn't work at all on the production database.  I have no idea why, but I had to roll back to the old version.  I'll work on that problem tomorrow.

Sunday updates

Visible Changes

• Added brief attraction overviews to Section pages (e.g. Frontierland attractions)
• Displaying ratings on each park's attraction list page (e.g. All Magic Kingdom Attractions)
• Added icon for browser bookmarks and toolbars
• Clicks on outside web links will open pages in a new window/tab (thanks to everyone who provided feedback on that issue)

Invisible Changes

• No longer requesting Google's API JavaScript from every page.  Now only on map pages.
• Added kangaroo icon for browser bookmarks and toolbars
• Updated sitemap for search engines
• Minor data changes that won't be visible until the next database update (TBD)

Registration and rooviews are now live

Major changes today!

• User registration is now available.  (Real site registration, not beta tester sign-up.)
• Write a Rooview is now available for attractions.
• Added "Known Issues" page (link in the footer)

For now the site won't send e-mail asking you to confirm your registration.  Once you register, just click the "sign in" link to sign into your account.  After you're signed in you can write all the rooviews you want.  (You can only write one per attraction.)

Known Issues:

• See the list.

As always, please keep sending your feedback and bug reports.  Technical bugs will start to pop up now because of the additional interactivity. I received 10 problem reports and suggestions (!) and they're very helpful. Thanks especially to Todd, Rodger, Pat, Jen, and my mom!

FYI -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN bots continue to scour the site, but the new pages probably won't show up in search results for weeks.

Save Mr. Toad!

Most of the changes made today aren't immediately obvious, but they're good steps.  Overall things are on-track to a much more usable site by the end of this week, which happens to be the 4th of July holiday!

Changes visible today (to humans or bots):

• The map links on Park pages now works correctly, no longer throwing Google API errors
• The sitemap now includes Attraction list pages (visible only to search engines)
• Page option text in the right rail is a bit smaller to prevent 3-line links

Behind the scenes:

• Researched and installed the ReCAPTCHA Rails gem, which will be used on registration pages to prevent spam.
• Tested ReCAPTCHA verification.  Works as expected on the live site.
• Added registration and sign-in links to the top navigation, not yet visible to users.
• Set maximum character lengths for attraction headlines and rooviews. (Thanks, Pat!)
• Changed the Downtown Disney / Pleasure Island database entry to include closing plans in September 2008.  Save Mr. Toad!

Up Wednesday:

• Make registration and sign-in links visible to users.
• Return users to the correct page after sign-in.
• Finalize rooview grid.
• Fix rating stars.
• Move some graphics to Amazon Web Services that are currently hosted on the main server.  I'm really happy with the speed I'm seeing on photos served by AWS, and the total price so far ($0.18).

Open issues:

• Spam posts can be a problem for a community site like Planaroo.  There are a few ways of dealing with spam including: 1) require registration and sign-in before posting, 2) require CAPTCHA verification when rooviews are added, and 3) delay posts until they're approved by an administrator.  Planaroo will require registration before posts can be made, but issues 2 and 3 are tougher to decide.  CAPTCHA is annoying but effective.  Delaying posts works (eBay does it for listings) but seems paternalistic and unnecessary for known users.  At the moment I'm leaning toward requiring registration to post (which requires CAPTCHA once), but holding off on other techniques until there's actually a problem.  I'd appreciate any comments or thoughts.
• Pat had an interesting question.  There are outside web links in the right rail of Parks pages, and there will be many more on other pages of the site.  They're there because I think it's important that people can easily find the official sites, and because I don't want to keep up with this like park hours.  Pat wondered if it might be best to spawn a new window when these links are clicked.  Right now they simply take you to that page, in the same window.  Thoughts?

Today's Changes

Today's changes:

• Did a lot of submissions to search engines
• Added a list of clickable section names to the Park pages
• Added a link to all attractions in the right rail of the Park pages
• Added a link to Google Maps from all Park pages
• Minor content changes on Parks pages
• Changed the size of the Google Ad box to 200x200

Up next:

• Fix the alert Google Maps throws when looking at a park map
• Enable site registration
• Work on star ratings (These are not visible, but they're broken.)
• Work on enabling rooviews

To do this week...

Thanks to everyone who pinged me with questions this morning.  I'll do my best to keep you up to date via this blog.

Known issue: Navigation
Navigation between the home page, parks, sections, and attractions will improve soon.  I know its bad right now. It's possible (but not fun) to get to all the content pages through the breadcrumbs navigation at the top of the interior pages, but there will soon be more direct ways to get around. The site was built from the bottom up and I'm afraid it shows.  The attractions pages are mostly complete, but everything else is behind.  Most of this week will be spent getting everything into line.  I also plan to turn on registration and rooviews (reviews) before the week is out.

Known issue: Beta Registration
The home page asks people to sign up as official beta testers, but some of you have tried and been denied.  That's because I added about 50 people to the pre-authorized list over the weekend.  If you're blocked, you're already on the list.  I admit, my messaging could be better.  I'll add a note tonight.
 
Design
On the design front, a friend and former co-worker at Orlando Sentinel Online (Caryn Dahm) is helping with home page design, but it will take a little while to get that up and running.  For now I'm just trying to get as many pages up and running as possible (on static URLs) so the search engines will start to pick them up.  By the time they do, the site should work better than it does today.

Welcome bots!
While traffic from humans to the site is low today, the search engine bots have been busy sucking up all the content. I submitted sitemaps and URLs to Google, Yahoo, Yahoo China, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask.com this morning.  Google has already scanned almost every content and photo page, and Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask all visited briefly.  It will be interesting to see how quickly content is indexed.

Planaroo (alpha? beta?) has launched

After many months, the initial test of Planaroo.com launched on Sunday, June 29.

For the moment the site only includes content and photos about the Walt Disney World resort in Orlando, Florida.  Universal Studios and Sea World will be added to the mix soon.  The content is complete, but it's just not visible yet.

Many of the site's key features aren't turned on yet.  Hang in there while I get everything going.

Thanks to everyone who has helped Planaroo get to this point.  I'm still not sure if this is going to be a business or a hobby, but the experience of building and launching a site from scratch is one I won't soon forget.

Thanks,
Kenny