What's new on naplesplus (Collier County's Electronic Village, Naples News)

First: A random Naplesplus page: POWDERY STRAP AIRPLANT

(new)  
 September 22, 2011 We passed the 1,000,000 visitor mark! Not bad! Thanks everybody!

 august 2, 2011 Added Google Plus One feature to all pages of this site. This is a test of the Google+ feature. If you see any funny behavior on this site - let me know.

 June 4, 2010 Haven't updated the "updates" page in a while! Testing out a basic Facebook Share. I hate making too many changes to the basic structure of the site - but as I find myself on facebook more and more, being disconnected from the facebook world on naplesplus is simply silly.

 Nov 1, 2009: Many updates, but I wanted to show this off first: WebSiteGrader gives free.naplesplus.us a 96 out of 100 - not bad!

 Oct 2, 2009: It took two days and a LOT OF HEADACHES, but naplesplus is now:

1) XHTML 1.0 TRANSITIONAL complient 2) Respects If-Modified-Since (this took the longest time), which means crawlers can skip over pages that haven't changed. 3)Added caching to speed up delivery of pages

So, these behind the scenes things aren't mostly visible, but they help the mechanism behind naplesplus work more smoothly. (I hope!)

But #4 is also exciting:

4) Added QR code to each article page, and made the site more iPhone aware.

I don't know what difference this will make, but only time will tell.

The QR code means that an Android or other fancy smart phone can automatically get the name / address of a business and add it to their address books.

 Sept 29, 2009 Just unblocked a lot of ip ranges which USED to be "bogons" but are not anymore. I don't know if this is wise or not, but I figured I like to give a fair shake to access naplesplus, and if its abused by a web robots, out it goes again. I've opened the website back up for China and Japan, and removed an accidental block to part of Australia.

I'm also opening it back up to roadrunner, so hopefully it'll work out okay. We'll see!

 August 30th, 2009

more additions to the new viewable external links:

If you are logged into Naplesplus, while you are viewing an external website, you can click, "New Post" and a magical panel will pop up on the left side of your screen. From there, you can copy/paste the interesting information for that website you're looking at, and make a new posting to naplesplus. EASY!

 August 29, 2009 NEW FEATURE: External links are now viewable while on naplesplus! A feature very similar to Facebook, StumbleUpon and many other websites, when you click on a link that takes you outside of NaplesPlus, you are presented with the page with four options:

1) Open the page fully (by clicking on the link showing next to "You are now viewing..."

2) Return to the previous NaplesPlus page you came from

3) Search NAPLESPLUS for anything (a convenient search box is provided

4) Use the page that is showing.

And to SEO folks: Our "View this page" feature is SEO friendly! The link next to "You are viewing" is 301-redirected to the actual site, so pagerank is preserved.

 July 18, 2009 Added a Google Voice #! It will get you to me even better: 239.BIZ.TALK

Or you can use this widget:



Also, I've been trying to figure out what's been happening to the rankings of pages. Seems that Goog has been consolidating pages, which is great for "pagerank" but not as good for the findability of local area businesses. We had a good showing on hReview but that's gone. Hopefully it'll work out soon -- we need to help the local economy as best we can.

 June 26, 2009 A number of background modifications: Also, I've instituted 301 redirects for external "clicks". Basically, this means the click tracking behaves better than it did before (which was using temporary redirects). This means that the website being sent to will be properly recognized by search engines. It's technical -- but to put it shortly, it's the "better" way to do things.

 June 4, 2009: I've been busy in the background. The website looks the same on the outside, but it's always changing on the inside.

I've done some meta tag work to help out http://bing.com and http://yahoo.com, who utilize keywords. I hesitated for a long time, but tonight I encoded the meta keywords tag using whatever tags people put to describe their pages. This probably won't make a difference to Google, but the others will have better luck finding your pages now.

I've also added a few sections. One of them is for businesses we forgot to add and another for engineers who work in Collier County. As always, I hope that people find their own pages I created for them here, and make good usage of them. They do, and continue to do so, which makes me happy.

If I haven't mentioned it already, I've made this an hReview capable site. This means that the reviews and rankings you do MAY have an impact on the overall rating for whatever your page is about.

I've also enhanced the SEARCH feature by adding a normal automatic RSS feed to show up when you do a search. This means, on newer browsers, you can easily subscribe to a feed based on your keyword, whatever it is, and you can read it in your favorite RSS reader.

 May 15th: WOW, I think my head is going to explode. Not ONLY geocode (again) about 34,000 businesses in the area, but I ALSO created 39 KML files, Google maps + Google Earth + Mapplets of these businesses. Tired! -search for

»

to see them.)

But that's not all. I FOUND PHONE NUMBERS. Oh, what a pain that was. About 4800 businesses on naplesplus now have their phone numbers, a feature that was horribly missing, and I ALSO managed to figure out proper CATEGORIES for these businesses. I'm updating the categories on the site bit by bit... that basically means searches either native or through Google or through Maps will have a better shot of your business being found out there. I'm on a mission, and I'm not gonna stop. Here's hoping Google gets the idea and updates some of your older pages. And, as always ... drop me a line, and I'll make you the editor of your business pages (as hundreds of you have already done)

I'm also working on the RDFa format. I was going to do it now, but I have to get the reviewing system up to date with hReview, which I'm not totally capable of yet. (I need to bring back the 5 star system here, instead of the "vote" system, but that's going to take a massive further effort that I'm not ready for yet.

So for now, 4800 of you now have your business phone numbers + categories properly set. I still have 32,000 to go, but it's a hell of a beginning!

 May 6, 2009: lots of behind the scenes work.
 April 28: Removed chat feature. Glad to see more and more local businesses taking advantage of their free pages here on naplesplus. I'm glad it's been helping businesses get themselves found, especially the newest ones just starting out - they are the ones I really am focused on!

If anybody has any advice on making the navigation better, I'm all ears!
 April 14th, 2009: Moved the new Naples Chat feature from the side menu of EVERY page, to be on the FRONT PAGE, just before the news. Let's see how people like it.
 April 1st, 2009 @ 2:50pm: Using MOZILLA FIREFOX? Look up where you have the Search box for Google -- upper right hand side of your screen.

See the little down arrow? Click on it.

Now you'll see my little face next to two things:

Naples FL Search (naplesplus server)

and

Naples FL Search (Google engine)

By scrolling down, you can easily add one or both of these search engines to your web browser!

What are they? Well, the "naplesplus server" searches right here on Naplesplus - as if you had used the searchbox on the left of every page.

The "google engine" utilizes the "Custom Search Engine" for naplesplus (which also incorporates Naples daily news and other naples area places). Try it out! It's coolness, indeed.

 April 1st, 2009: Technical background stuff: I'm temporarily disabling the "auto-archive" of Naplesplus which automatically categories new entries by date and puts them in a "week of xxx" and "month of xxx". I think it's unnecessary duplication and potentially confusing.

I'll leave it off for a month or so and see what happens.

I've also been dutifully scouring the 'net for places that my feed is "auto posted" to. I really would like to post new biz to Twitter (as some people do look forward to it), but they'll just have to subscribe to the RSS feed for now.

I think I overextended naplesplus and now it's time to relocalize.

 March 30, 2009: I'm finding that the feeds for naplesplus are ALL OVER THE PLACE! No wonder Google was less happy with us than it was last month. Time for trimming. Got rid of auto-delicious (which was feeding several *other* sites unnecessarily), and blocked a few German feed-gathering sites from my htaccess. Gotta stay on top of things. So much experimentation, though. I try something - it's great! But then suddenly, blammo -- last month's great idea is today's horrendous mistake.

So, I'm pruning. ping.fm should be feeding NOBODY for now - at least for a few days - and if the big G still respects me in the morning for pulling back (hopefully its new integration with feedburner will be plenty), then I'll keep things like this. If not, I may have to put delicious back.

Only time will tell. They update SO FREQUENTLY now that's it's hard to see what's going on. Running a website is like having a digital baby.

 March 29, 2009: Making Google happier. Started putting rel="canonical" in the headers of sections and articles. It's another way to specify a "permalink". This removes problems of identical pages showing up at slightly different urls. Hope it helps google + naplesplus!

 March 24, 2009: Wow to me! I figured out how to show ONLY Collier County events on the calendar. You think that'd be easy, right? It's not! GEOCODING street addresses is SUCH at its infancy right now.

When I put together the events feeds (which come from a dozen different, convoluted places and ways and methods that I'm afraid to get into right now), I often will get stuff from Estero, Ft Myers, Bonita Springs, etc as well. While it'd be okay if there were a map that had those things on it, I'm really trying to focus hard on Collier County FL as much as possible, rather than trying to be everything for everybody.

So, after getting the latitude and longitude of the various events (again, you don't wanna know what a house of cards it is that it works at ALL), THEN I had to selectly CUT OUT areas that don't belong.

THANKFULLY, due to two wonderful facts, I could do what I ended up doing:

Fact #1: Collier County is so far south, I don't have to worry about anything south of collier accidentally showing up.

Fact #2: The SHAPE of collier county! Ever look at it? There's two beautiful rectangles that I can work with.

So, I ended up:

a) cutting out anything north + east of the northeasternest corner of collier county b) then cutting out anything north and east of the inside corner of the first rectangle (working from east to west c) then cutting out anything north and east of the other inside corner of the next rectangle.

Long story short, what's left behind is ONLY Collier County!

Without the wonderful shape of C.C., this would not have worked. But it does! The hardest part really, was finding out what the longitude and latitude was of those exact points where Lee + Collier connect.

Had to use a federal government mapping thing called TIGER. Wonderful thing.

Hope it helps you find things to do 'round here every day!
 March 23, 2009: Been working hard on the Events Map on the front page. Now showing many daily Drink specials (happy hours, etc) along with the usual plays, meetings, etc.

 March 4, 2009: Added new Youtube Collier County videos to the front page. (took four hours to figure out how to get it working through their messed up feed! Thanks Yahoo Pipes!).

Also, started working with hCalendar. To see an hCalendarized feed NAPLES FL ANNUAL EVENTS - JANUARY THROUGH DECEMBER -- you might not notice the difference unless you have "Operator" toolbar for Firefox - but other computerized systems will notice it.
 Mar 2, 2009: New Businesses added to naplesplus are encoded with hCard + vCard support. This means if you have a tool like Operator Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox, you can download the vCard for the business and have it in your Microsoft Outlook Address book, among other uses. It's a feature for the future as more and more services recognize and utilize this very useful format.
 Feb 23, 2009: Searching through links (jobs, news, calendar feed, videos) now activated! You'll find a new tab when you search, called "links" which will give you the top 50 matches. It's truly expanded the POWER of naplesplus!
 Feb 8, 2009: Added a map of events in naples! It's based on the feeds I get from various sources, and Yahoo extracts the locations from the feed itself. Pretty neat stuff!
 Feb 6, 2009: http://winksite.mobi/simplify3/naples is a MOBILE version of naplesplus. I'm debating about adding it to the main menu. For now, I'll just make mention of it here, and see who finds it.
 Jan 29, 2009: whew - just had a nice birthday yesterday. Thai for lunch. Anyhow -- I've been busy adding new businesses as they come along, and I've been putting a lot of local banks in here (there are 112 in Naples FL that I could find!), so hopefully this helps those who were wondering "where are the banks!"
 Jan 03, 2009: Added Health Care Providers — Nursing Homes, Surgical Centers, Companions, Hospitals which contains over 100 Health Care Providers in Collier County. It's a brand new section of naplesplus!
 Upgraded server software to YACS Macnana 8.11RC30. Latest version of Yet Another Community System. The upgrade seemed to go smoothly. It'll take a while to figure out what the added features are. One thing is that the profiles have been upgraded to allow you to add your own discussion groups, have private conversations with other members and the like. (more social networking features). I'm pretty sure everythin still works, but if you find something is no longer working, just email simplify3@gmail.com and let me know and I'll track it down and try to fix it.
 December 21, 2008: Moved Google Friend Connect to the right hand side of the home page. BUT, more importantly - I geocoded / geotagged 6591 Naples / Collier County businesses. It was a laborious process and I have about 28,000 to go. (it was NOT AUTOMATED (well, not totally). These business pages now also include a link to the Google Map of the business address, which will further allow you to use Google's features of getting directions, adding reviews, and the like, further enhancing naplesplus and its usefulness to residents, visitors and the business community.
 December 15, 2008: Experimenting with Feedjit -- on the left you'll see pages people visited and where they came from. This feature may remain or go, depending on its popularity or effect on the server.
 added 210 new businesses to naplesplus. Google should pick them up soon, so if you started a new business since November '08, see if it's in here already!
 December 12, 2008: New section for Collier County Plants found here: COLLIER COUNTY PLANTS 1300 plants listed with pictures.
 December 8, 2008: Added 1500 new physicians to the physician's directory at: Collier County Physician's Directory If you find your doctor there, feel free to leave a comment and add whatever information you might have. I'll fill in the gaps when I can.
 GOOGLE FRIEND CONNECT IS HERE! Look to your left - and there it is. Try it out!
 November 30, 2008: added a hundred or so new businesses and doctors and continuing to do so.
 added some some more businesses and doctors.

 November 12, 2008: Started adding physicians to the physician's directory Collier County Physician's Directory

The first batch will be chiropractors. I plan on adding about 10 per day (I don't want to overwhelm Google - they don't like it when I suddenly add 1400 new pages at once!) 'til its done. Hopefully the physicians will find their pages on my site and add their pictures, websites, etc. If you happen to know of their homepages, phone numbers, email addresses, feel free to "Add Comment" to their pages and I'll incorporate it into their page.

And if you are the physician in question, let me know and I'll give you complete rights to your page so that you can freely add pictures, advertisements, etc. Just as I do for the businesses in the business directories.

 November 10, 2008: Reorganized Controversial Topics since there are 400+ subjects for discussion, and it was tricky to navigate.

Now they are organized in alphabetical sections like so:

Subjects-A-B Subjects-C-1 Subjects-C-2 Subjects-C-3 Subjects-D-1 Subjects-D-2 Subjects-E-1 Subjects-E-2 Subjects-F Subjects-G-1 Subjects-G-2 Subjects-H-1 Subjects-H-2 Subjects-I Subjects-J-K Subjects-L-1 Subjects-L-2 Subjects-M-1 Subjects-M-2 Subjects-N-O Subjects-P-1 Subjects-P-2 Subjects-P-3 Subjects-Q Subjects-R-1 Subjects-R-2 Subjects-S-1 Subjects-S-2 Subjects-S-3 Subjects-T

This should make it easier to navigate the controversial topics section. I also created a "master list" which gives instant access not only to each section, but to add comments here: Controversial topics for discussion

Ultimately, I'd like to create a widget that REALLY makes it easy to make comments, but so far, the Comment-API which uses wfw:commentRSS is being a pain to me.

 November 8, 2008: Changed name of "Unusual" section to Weekly - with pics!, since there is more weekly newspaper feeds in that section than there were Unusual-News stuff.

 Added Florida Weekly, Naples Edition, newspaper to "Weekly"! I'm really excited about this, because the Florida Weekly is a very new newspaper (only six issues) and they are not only nice enough to offer an RSS feed, but their RSS feed has PICTURES, which many feeds do not have.

 in the past week, I've added a hundred or so new Naples Florida based corporations and LLC's, and I'm starting (slowly) to build up the Collier County Schools section of the website.

I'm still hoping one day to be able to get the Naples Sun Times in here a little better represented than it is now, but that's a matter of them adding feeds to their site. I WILL find a way one of these days ,so long as they don't mind

 November 3, 2008: http://free.naplesplus.us is now listed in Google with SITELINKS! I don't know how long it will last, but it's exciting because it means, in some sense, we've "made it". Do a search for "naplesplus" on Google and you'll see it

The exciting image is here:

Sitelinks for naplesplus!

We're also up to 888 members - working towards 1000 members by the end of 2008! Thanks folks!

 October 14, 2008: Moving Adsense ads around a little. Added a bunch of new businesses to the directory as well as some science articles about quantum physics and the atom, and I'm adding more jokes.
 August 7, 2008: Slowly allowing a little of Yahoo's "Slurp" back on. They were overloading my site like nothing else. I'm letting one slurp bot in and going to open up one ip from yahoo and see how that goes.
 August 3, 2008: Restored accessibility an ip range i erroneously had blocked off. I think I accidentally blocked 1/2 of Lee County's Embarq DSL customers and all of Verizon Wireless customers, all because of a couple of naughty users! Sorry everybody!

 July 14, 2008 pt 2: I have temporarily blocked portions of the COX ISP and a portion of the ROAD RUNNER ISP from naplesplus as the only hits from them seem to be bizarre ones. If you ARE on one of these services and want to use naplesplus, let me know at simplify3@gmail.com and I'll investigate further.
 July 14, 2008: Been further optimizing ads. Also, I added a whole bunch of Ad Council ads (every one that I personally believe in). Unlike the Google Ads, I don't get any credit for clicking on them. I just think it's a good public service, as you don't see Ad Council ads on TV as much as you used to.
 July 9, 2008: Just added 1840 new businesses to Collier County Business Directory! These are new fictitious name registrations from July 2007 to July 2008. (whew, I got WAY behind). If you see any duplications, let me know. This brings the total number of businesses showing on napleslpus to.. 31000 or 32000. Also, let me know if your name is listed as owner but you want it remain private (or if your home address is showing). I'll take whatever yuo want off / add whatever you want in (like phone number, hours, etc), then I'll give you rights to that page so you can edit it at whim.
 July 8, 2008: TimeZone FINALLY SET PROPERLY! After over a year with the wrong time (naplesplus uses a California server (narly, dude) because it's just easier for me) and the time zone was always Veggie-burger TIME. Argh. How frustrating that was. Anyhow, we finally are running on LOCAL TIME! That means all of the incoming RSS feeds will be set to the proper time. Also, I worked on making the advertising a little less obtrusive. I hope it's working out okay for you!
 July 7, 2008: Some housekeeping. Moved the teacup yorkie, english bulldog and other pet adoption scams to the pet adoption scam section of this website (yes, we actually have a spot just for them). Gave our most frequent advertiser, Gene Federico, his own section in Personal Spaces, improved the advertising on this site so as to be the least intrusive yet the most attractive (so that you can visit our advertisers and naplesplus gets a few pennies each time you do so) and did various behind the scenes things that should help speed up the site even more.
 July 1, 2008: Switched Naples Youtube video feeds to Youtube searches as the Google video feed was messy.
 Upgraded system to latest software version (June 29, 2008).
 Moved system from previous web hosting service to its new host on http://naplesnerds.com - no changes are required on your part - I'm just letting you know.
 Added interactive chat functionality almost everywhere on naplesplus
 User profiles are enhanced - including Private Messaging between members!
 There's even more features that even I'm not aware of yet! I'm bringing them all online as fast as I can! --Kenneth Udut, Naples, FL, webmaster.