Zapatag Shirts!

Thanks to online apparel outfits like Cafepress, Zazzle, Spreadshirt and Printfection, you can have promotional “swag” before you have anything to promote. So, in early anticipation of Zapatag.com becoming the next internet sensation, I’ve made some basic Zapatag T-shirts for people who want to show off their inherent coolness.

• Zapatag T-Shirt in Light Colors
• Zapatag T-Shirt in Dark Colors
• Women’s Zapatag T-Shirt in Light Colors
• Women’s Zapatag T-Shirt in Dark Colors

You can even customize your shirt to add your preferred slogan (I couldn’t decide)… or even other images.

Real Geeks Ride

Zapatag is still but a baby, an amoeba, an early effort that’s barely begun. But that doesn’t mean it can’t step up and support a good cause. Especially when that cause is advanced by two great guys and meshes with Zapatag’s goal of making our roads a better place to travel. So Zapatag.com is proud to support Real Geeks Ride.

Real Geeks Ride is a cross-country bike tour by two geeks — Joe Philipson and Carlos Urreta — who hope to inspire other geeks to bike to work instead of drive. They are not hardcore or even serious cyclists, and they plan to learn about bikes and the biking community as part of their 3,000-mile journey. They’ll be fully “geeked out,” of course, and will document every step of the trip online.

The ride begins May 20 in Pennsylvania, and ends August 2 in Seaside, Oregon. Hopefully, they’ll be “zapping” plates along the way. We look forward to watching their progress across the country, and in getting more geeks onto two wheels.

Unfuddle

I’ve used countless bug tracking, ticket tracking, help desk tracking and general project management solutions. Some were overly simple, and some were overly complex for what we needed. All were great, essentially, provided you were using the right tool. Examples include Bugzilla, Flyspray, Dotproject, and Trac (installed), or BaseCamp, TestTrack and TargetProcess (hosted).

For Zapatag, I decided to try yet another option: Unfuddle. Why? Well, they’re a local company, for one. Two, they’ve got a great name. And three, their solution includes subversion and Git integration. Of course, I’m a beginner when it comes to subversion, and I’m not using it to develop Zapatag… but it seemed to be a differentiating feature that could matter down the line.

I wanted a basic, fairly customizable ticket tracking system. Something that was a step up from the static Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that my development team was haphazardly compiling from e-mail conversations and updating only periodically. And Unfuddle was the perfect choice. It has an elegant, straightforward interface, but with all kinds of granular functionality for those who need it. Tickets tied to milestones tied to projects, and a wonderful array of categories and other options to organize everything.

And I’m only using the free version, which allows only two users (my development team and I), doesn’t support file attachments, and a number of other advanced features like time tracking. But looking at the various plans, they seem well structured to allow a project to grow without breaking the bank.

Anyway, if you’re looking for something on the simpler end of the project management scale, but with lots of room to grow, check out Unfuddle. I’m glad I did.

Almost to Beta

After some ups and downs, substantial progress has been made in Zapatag development. I can’t stop cringing at how ugly the site is, but as long as the code works, pretty can come later. If I hadn’t somehow broken the mapping feature yesterday, I’d be asking friends to start beta testing this week.

I think it’ll be another week, now, before other people can start poking around. And they will have to be people who won’t hold the clunky, PaintShop-esque design against me.

Some friends have forwarded me links to a couple of new license plate reporting services, which is always a “good news, bad news” thing: good because this is obviously an idea that people find compelling, bad because there’s a pretty good chance these other sites actually know what they’re doing. One looks more like a .NET database class project than a live site, but the other has a gorgeous “Web 2.0″ look with a smooth, beveled blue look and ads already in rotation. Zapatag won’t have ads… but it won’t exactly be making money, either.

Twitterability

The simplicity of Twitter is part of what inspired the version of Zapatag that’s finally being built, so of course I wanted Zapatag to interact with Twitter in some way. If all goes as planned, you’ll be able to zap a tag via Twitter. Provided you’re following @zapatag on Twitter, and include your own Twitter username in your Zapatag user profile, you’ll be able to submit reports via Twitter (and therefore by SMS as well).

Just post a tweet beginning with “@zapatag” followed by a space, the two-letter state abbreviation, a colon, and the license plate number. Anything that follows the next space is the text of your zap. It sounds a bit more complicated than it is, but the format includes spaces and colons so Zapatag can parse the different parts of your Twitter post. For example, this tweet:

@zapatag HI:ABC123 Illegal left turn on Keeaumoku Street.

Will zap the Hawaii license plate ABC123 with “Illegal left turn on Keeaumoku Street.”

Of course, zapping tags by Twitter will mean you won’t be able to include every detail you can specify at the Zapatag site, such as car or driver descriptions, map points, or emoticons. But sometimes you’ll want to quickly post a Zap via Twitter’s mobile interface or via SMS, and this is a great way to do that. Please don’t zap tags while driving, however. You’re liable to get zapped yourself, or worse!

Eventually, I’d like you to be able to receive tweets posted in your area… but that requires more map and math magic than I’ve got right now!

First Look

I’ve told probably a hundred people about Zapatag since I first started thinking about it three years ago. And when I started getting serious about it at the beginning of the year, I shared the spec and several screenshots with maybe a dozen good friends. But those were Photoshop fantasies (rudimentary though they were). Now that developers have actually been writing code, little bits and pieces of the site actually exist. And earlier this week, I posted the above screencap to Flickr.

Of course, the license plates above look almost exactly like the Photoshop mocks, which in my view is a good thing. While the programmers sorted out how the states and plate numbers would be handled, I created the blank license plate backgrounds. It took considerably longer than I expected, and some state plate designs came out pretty horrid. In a few cases, I just opted for a simple colored field and text. But there are a few plates that came out quite nice, even if I do say so myself. I’ve certainly come to appreciate the different designs and the different icons that represent the 50 states.

Yes, I know, there are special plates. I found some states have maybe 30 or 40 unique designs to commemorate everything from sports teams to social causes. There’s no way in heck I’d be able to design all of those, and at present, I don’t even know how they work. Do they have special numbering sequences? Can there be a “standard” plate and a “special” plate with the same characters? These are all things I think I’ll have to learn the hard way as real data starts to come in.

Today I finished the last state: Wyoming. And that, essentially, will be the extent of my real contributions to the development of Zapatag. I’m not much of a designer, but I’m even less of a developer. From this point forward, all I can do is look at the things the developers create, try to break them, and ultimately refine them.

What’s In a Name?

Of course, this project only got the name “Zapatag” last April, when it popped into my head and turned out to also be available as a .com domain name. And as far as names go, I’m happy. It’s both catchy and meaningful… provided you catch on that a “tag” is another word for a license plate. “Zapping” a tag seemed like an action that felt quick, short, and not entirely negative.

It was fun thinking up options to be sure. Frankly, I was worried for a bit that I was getting stuck in branding paralysis. You can think up names and look up domain names for days! Nearly every single combination of words that were synonyms of “street,” “driver,” “report,” and “license plate” was considered.

Now, this project did have an early code name of sorts — at least in my head. One inspired by the flurry of Web 2.0 sites that shunned the letter ‘e.’. But the domain name wasn’t available, and I eventually came to like “Zapatag” better.

When the domain name did come up as expired this year, though, I couldn’t help but snap it up: Streetr.com. Can you imagine?