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Late December Changes

01/02/09

Late December Changes

New Fuel Finder Features

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.

Amenity Score

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.

Accuracy Improvements

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.

Affiliation Pages

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.

New Mom & Pop Stops

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.

Driving Directions

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™

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We use this blog to announce new or upcoming features to the TruckMaster Fuel Finder. Feel free to post your thoughts about the tool, or suggest a new feature that you feel would make a valuable addition.

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