🔥 Dropping a new feature

What is the best time to release a new feature? Some would say it’s Friday, but I believe in the late night hours of a Sunday. I mean, what can possibly go wrong 🤷 right? There are already a couple of users of Bettertori, so the best time to deliver new feautures for them is whenever its ready good enough.

The Map

Bettertori is all about providing a better, more intuitive way for the users to find stuff they are looking for. There are already great filtering methods, providing all sort of charts to visualize the data, but there is one thing missing: a map.

A map, where the listing can be shown, to give a better understanding of the location of the items. This can get especially handy in planning a trip, or to match it with other listings, which can be potentially close by.

While these are not exact addresses of locations, they are definitely close enough to give a good idea of the area where the item is. The map is interactive, and can be zoomed in and out, and the markers can be clicked to show more information about the listing.

The map comes with a set of Filtering options, so it’s easy to place items on the map of different categories. As a reminder, the data on Bettertori comes from the email notification you are receicing from Tori.fi, which keeps track of different product categories. These can be added / removed to the map as needed.

If there are items of multiple categories on the Map, the listings have different colors, so it’s easy to distinguish between them.

How does it work?

Every lsiting in the Tori.fi email notification comes with a raw area, where the item is located. This location then gets saved in to the database, alongside with the item itself.

The map itself is built with Mapbox. To calculate an intermediate location for the marker, the raw location is passed to the Mapbox Geocoding API, which returns a set of coordinates. These coordinates are then used to place the marker on the map.

Future plans for the map

Currently the map displays listings based on their area they are located at. However, in the future, I am planning to enrich the Map’s functionality by adding more features, such as:

• Search: Search for a specific location, and see the listings in that area.

• Distance: Show listings within a certain distance from a specific location.

If you have any other ideas or suggestions, feel free to send a message using the Support page on Bettertori.fi.

Go, and see where are your items located!