If you have a Twitter account, you can now let MapSkip tweet your stories to the world!

As of today, we have now Twitter integrated into the story editor- which allows you to tweet a link to your latest MapSkip story automatically when you publish. If you have a Twitter account, you can go to your Passport in MapSkip and in the User Information tab you can now authorize a connection between your Twitter account and your MapSkip account.

Just click the link, log into Twitter, and authorize the connection. And don’t worry - MapSkip never sees your username and password in Twitter: We are using the open OAuth protocol, which was specifically designed to allow users of sites like Twitter and MapSkip to connect their accounts without sharing passwords with anybody.

Once you have your Twitter account authorized, you will see an extra field at the end of the story editor in MapSkip, which automatically will be populated with the title of your story - but you can change the text of that tweet to whatever you want. Just keep in mind that MapSkip will add a short link at the end of the text, so you are limited to just 100 characters. Happy Tweeting!

We’ve finished a first round of small bugfixes and improvements to the site. Most notable is an improved Send-to-a-Friend email that now features in addition to links to the story also a link to the place.

In connection with this, there is now a new link at the bottom of the open placemarks panel: “Send this place to a friend”. If you click this link and enter an email address, an automatic email will be sent from the server with a link back to the same open place.

We are currently experimenting with technologies to increase the page load performance on the site - Mapskip.com is admittedly a little bit graphics heavy and that together with the complex data manipulations going on in the background keeps the servers quite busy!

So you may have (hopefully) noticed a speed-up in the page load times as of today since we have started to use Amazon’s powerful CloudFront Network and their S3 Storage solution for many of the files that your browser has to download to display these pages.

We hope to use these services extensively over the next few months for faster service across the globe - we have many users in Asia and Europe that should see marked performance gains from this new setup.

Please let us know if these changes have created issues that we haven’t foreseen - or of course also if MapSkip’s new speed blows your socks off!

We’ve added the story export feature to the My Students section of our teacher account interface.

It works very similar to the standard story export, but it creates one text file with the stories for all student accounts associated with the teacher account. This allows teachers on MapSkip to one-click export all student stories for offline review and archiving.

While offline review is the anticipated use for this new feature, please let us know if you find a new creative way to use the exported stories!

MapSkip is part of a whole galaxy of Web 2.0 sites that invite users to add their creative output to an online database that these users have no control over. And while we have a clear policy in regards to user content (see the link to our Privacy Policy and Copyright in the footer of every page), it doesn’t do our users much good to own their stories if there is no easy way to get their data back.

So to fix this issue we have now added a story export feature to MapSkip - if you are logged in and go to the My Passport page and click on the My Stories link, you will find a “Export All Your Stories” link just under the row of tabs.

This feature opens a new window and the MapSkip site will create a simple text page with all of your stories as one long list. At this point you can simply save this page from your browser’s File menu, or you can cut and paste stories into a word processor on your computer.

We are still adding new improvements to the teacher interface of MapSkip:

Today’s update will assist teachers with the task of reviewing comments made by their students - in the Student Comments tab it is now possible to just review comments made within the last 7 days.

Also, to gain a quick overview of the comments made, the teacher can just roll over each of the listed story links in this tab and a small layer will pop up with the text of the comment.

We’ve overhauled the My Passport display for all of our users - there were too many usability and performance issues with the accordion-style interface and our content volume has frankly outgrown the old design.

The new design is now utilizing tabs for the different pages of the My Passport section:

In addition, teachers will now find a second set of tabs in the My Students area of the passport section:

Students & Stories is the previously existing list of students and their stories and Student Comments is a new feature that allows the teacher to review all comments written by the class on one page. In addition, student comments can  now also be disabled if necessary.

The teacher interface on MapSkip’s My Passport page is currently undergoing some changes, as you have maybe noticed by the slight layout tweaks over the last few days.

One of the first new features is now the ability to disable/re-enable student stories. Teachers can now disable accidental student stories from the My Passport page with a single click. The story will be listed in red once it is disabled, and only the teacher has at that point access to the story for further review or to re-enable it at a later point.

As always, please let us know in the comments below or through our contact us page if you have any issues with these new features or further suggestions.

Here in the MapSkip headquarters the wheels never stop! We’ve been experimenting with integrating the Google Earth plug-in on the homepage, but have been met with some unfortunate technical issues that will delay the 3D-map for a while longer.

But as a side effect of this, we’ve streamlined the in-map interface. All the different map types can now be picked through a  drop-down menu, which frees up valuable real estate. The new menu and the filter drop-down are now tidily stowed away in the top right corner of the map on our homepage.

We have to admit, we were surprised by the eager reaction to our new classroom features!

Several projects have been kicked off with quite a number of stories - both Memphis and Adelaide come to mind, where we have reached a hundred stories each.

To make all of these stories more accessible, we’ve extended the classroom toolbox with an open/close feature and a previous and next button that allows the user to easily jump from story to story within one classroom project:

 Thanks to all the students who are taking part in these projects!