We just hooked up a feature we've been testing in-house for awhile - the ability to leave reviews on truck stops that you've visited.
This new feature requires that you create a user account for the TruckMaster Fuel Finder™, so that we have some accountability built into the system, and keep spammers out as much as possible.
The basic operation of this system system is as follows:
We've yet to allow you to see ratings anywhere except for on the individual truck stop pages, i.e. they do not show up in the Fuel Finder results area, the affiliation pages, or the state listings. We want to observe posting behavior a few days prior to "hooking up" this last portion, as we want to make sure that we have "responsible" posts and ratings being assigned. The ultimate plan entails allowing you to sort returned results by the truck stop rating just as you can CPG, distance from origin, etc.
Hopefully you find this new feature as exciting as we do, we look forward to your comments.
Greg Dodson
TruckMaster Fuel Finder™ Team Leader
TruckMaster Your Trucking Company™
Well, you've asked for it (numerous times), and now we've added it - when you run a route or radius from the TruckMaster Fuel Finder™, we now show you the resulting truck stops on a map. If you hover over an icon, a summary of that stop is displayed. Clicking on a stop gives you a link to access the detail page with amenities, etc.
There are quite a few changes that we'd already like to add to this new feature, and will over the next couple of months.
A couple mentionables:
We really like this new feature, and hope that you will as well. It's brand new, so we haven't had a chance to do in-depth testing on all of the different browser versions, but we do know that it works great on FireFox 3+, as well as Explorer 6 & 7. We'll be testing on other browsers as time permits.
Give us your thoughts on other things that we can do with the mapping feature!
Greg Dodson
President
TruckMaster Logistics Systems, Inc.
TruckMaster Your Trucking Company™
I apologize, we've been a bit behind with our posts for new features, mainly because we've been busy developing the new features, then of course the holidays tend to cause some disruptions.
The amenity filter has been replaced with an amenity scoring system, which I think will be more useful to our users. Rather than simply skipping truck stops that we haven't recorded with certain amenities, they now will get more credit for having them, the more the better.
Here's the gist of how it works. If you request a truck stop with "Entertainment" and "Showers", your requests will each be given 50% priority.
Since there are multiple possible amenities for the "Entertainment" category (such as TV Lounge, Video Games, etc), as there are with showers (Women's Showers, Private Showers, etc), the 50% points Entertainment gets will be split into a max score based on how many of the possible amenities they have. Clear as mud? Thought so. The result is that the truck stops with more of the desired amenity categories should be given a higher score. You can also sort the returned results by this score (with distance from origin as the secondary sort).
We'll likely be refining this over the coming weeks.
It is a continual battle to ensure that the coordinates we have are accurate for each truck stop, but I can say with great assurance that we've made huge gains in this area over the past couple weeks. Our goal is to be within feet of each truck stop, but this will take us awhile given the number of stops that we're currently tracking.
You've probably noticed the affiliation pages that we added, you can now pull up and browse through all of the Flying J truck stops, or the Pilot truck stops, Petro truck stops, etc. We know that some people would rather manually browse than have the results returned to them through a form.
We added 716 smaller truck stops throughout the US. We are lacking amenity information for them at present, but will be diligently working to get it added as resources allow.
We've implemented Google's direction API on the truck stop pages, so that you can request directions to a truck stop from where you currently are. This is pretty cool stuff, but unfortunately is more geared for cars than trucks at the moment, so will not always pick a route that you'll be wanting to use.
So as you can see, we've been pretty busy. Hopefully you enjoy some of these new features and improvements.
Greg Dodson
President
TruckMaster Logistics Systems, Inc
TruckMaster Your Trucking Company™
We added quite a few new features, and improvements to existing features, this weekend.
Hopefully these new features will enhance your experience with the the TruckMaster Fuel Finder™ truck stop locator. As always, we welcome your feedback.
Greg Dodson
President
TruckMaster Logistics Systems, Inc.
TruckMaster Your Trucking Company™
We've added a new site for the TruckMaster Fuel Finder that should be more friendly for mobile phones / mobile devices at www.findfuelstops.mobi.
This site cuts out all but the most basic instructions, and formats in a way that should be a little bit better for a small screen.
Check this site out, then let us know what you think, or what we could improve on it.
Greg Dodson
President
TruckMaster Logistics Systems, Inc.
<< Previous ::