Searching has been implemented

Though I hoped to have more time this past week to really push with searching on GetOut, it just did not work out. But I was able to find a few hours this evening to work through the first version of the GetOut search capability.

The power of this search..

Currently, this feature does not bring much usefulness to users visiting GetOut. Being able to narrow down 6 or 7 listings is not *that* important. But down the road, this will be what sets us apart from similar sites. Like I mentioned in other postings, you will be able to pull up a B&B in Cape May, or a park with a tennis court within 5 miles of your house. What we have added this evening allows you to see the basic implementation of this. You can quickly get to the campground(s), or find a dog park.

Next, we will..

Now that we have this aspect of the search working, we are going to work on narrowing down by location next. This has turned out to be more complicated than we first thought. We want this system to be simple, where you will click as little as possible. But to make this "simple", we have to create 9 different solutions to fulfill 9 different ways of searching. I hope that we'll have something cool to share about this in the next week or two. We'll see.

Beyond searching, we are also pondering ways to add pictures to Getout pages, location listings and calendar listings. We also need to finalize how we'll handle mapping. What we have now is pretty complex, but there are some missing features. The calendar system is also VERY basic. We'll need to add someone additional features for this. We also are working on a rating system. This will allow a user to rate a park, the cleanliness of a bathroom, or the taste of their dinner.

Members, vacations, trip planning

I hope that by late Feb, we can open up memberships to people like you. This will get you a few cool things:

• Mark listings as favorites
• Mark listings as "To Do"
• Post comments/ratings
• Print out listing guides
• Create vacation itinerary with info and directions for multiple listings

If the NJ State travel site can do some of these things, I think we can get them done :)

Talk to you soon, Jeff C.