We are more than happy to welcome TeachersFirst as a new partner to MapSkip. TeachersFirst is a free service that is dedicated to help teachers in finding appropriate online resources for the classroom.

TeachersFirst has already reviewed MapSkip a little while ago and we were very interested in their constructive comments about the site.

We have tried to make MapSkip a family friendly site from the very beginning and we are excited about the opportunity to work with TeachersFirst in making MapSkip a better tool for teachers.

After a long summer of traveling and - alas - working very hard, we are now going into our second MapSkip coding autumn…We have a long list of changes and updates we want to integrate into the site, but for a while you will only notice things going even smoother than normal.

We have a couple of big features in the pipeline, but that will take a little while longer.

Let’s start with some technical changes:

As of right now we’ve updated our Google Maps libraries to the latest 2.x standard instead of the “old” 2.0 and we’ve changed all our code to use the new Google AJAX API loader. This has for now only minor consequences for you, but it makes our inner engineer very happy. Also, we can introduce new Google features much faster now.

And as a first new feature based on the new API loader - we use now Google’s new clientlocation feature, which means when a new user comes to MapSkip for the first time - or if a registered user comes back with a shiny new browser - MapSkip will take a guess at your location and open the map around your neighborhood.