to.uri.st blog

Time for http://beta.to.uri.st/, please report feedback via...

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:17:00 +0000

Time for http://beta.to.uri.st/, please report feedback via GetSatisfaction or Twitter.

A new beginning

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:31:54 +0000

Things have been very quiet around here for a while. The site has been plodding along but I haven’t been actively doing anything to it. That’s about to change.

I’ve been working on a major update to the site for the past few months. It will do away with the large full screen map as the sites main interface and instead use a more standard and easier to use format.

There’s still some more work to do on ironing out any remaining kinks, there’s no hard and fast schedule for getting things into a releasable state, but hopefully it won’t be much longer.

10 Danish secrets

Mon, 04 May 2009 15:37:03 +0100

Denmark.net have a list of 10 places in Denmark your tour guide will not know about. You can now find them on to.uri.st:

All the location data for attractions is now in, so when you...

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:17:00 +0100

All the location data for attractions is now in, so when you view an attraction you now get the “region” and the country it is in listed along with it. This info was reverse geocoded via Google, where the region is made up from whatever town level data is available.

Next is to allow this info to be changed if it is wrong without making the edit form too complicated.

I’ve updated the embeddable map so that it doesn’t try to use the standard GMaps popup...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:31:29 +0100

I’ve updated the embeddable map so that it doesn’t try to use the standard GMaps popup bubble since the map is often too small to fit the bubble in. It now has a little bar at the bottom that shows the attraction title when you click on one, like the gadget does.

I’ve also added it to the blog sidebar, over there.

Tourist attraction of the day

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:09:00 +0100

Tourist attraction of the day

Facebook integration

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:57:59 +0100

It’s been a bank holiday weekend of visiting family and friends, and of Facebook integration. Now I’m not a big Facebook user, but I appreciate that a lot of people are and that it’s a great way to virally spread the news, whatever that news might be.

So I’ve been adding Javascript integration into the site so that you can select to publish your attraction amends to your Facebook feed. I’m still working out some kinks so it’s not live yet.

It’s taken quite a while, the Facebook documentation is notoriously bad, missing a number of key points that’d saved me hours. For example, no where does it say that you can’t run your code from a site with “localhost” as a hostname, as soon as I switched the code to run from another hostname, it started working. I’m not sure why the documentation doesn’t mention this, or why this limitation is in place, surely most developers start out writing code on a “localhost” server.

More code changes today

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:11:39 +0100

I’ve hopefully improved performance by loading more data up front with the attraction markers so that you don’t need to request more data just to show the GMap popup bubble. This should make the map feel snappier.

I’ve also removed the expanding bubble, aka, the info window. The info window seemed like a neat idea at the time, a standard GMaps UI element that made sense as a place to show the full information about an attraction. However I still needed the content popup to show other pages, meaning I had two bunches of code for the two different types of information. So I’ve dropped info window so now we just have a single way to show information, via the content popup, making the code smaller and things hopefully simpler from the UI point of view too. Plus, the bubble transitions played havoc with the back button functionality so without it I’ve managed to shop out a whole bunch of nasty complex stuff.

AOTD appears to be kinda working, although it’s odd that Gallery 46 has shown up in FF and...

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:02:22 +0100

AOTD appears to be kinda working, although it’s odd that Gallery 46 has shown up in FF and Reader but not in the Twitter stream

So I had this idea. The stats pages are great but they show you the stats for a lat/lng bounding...

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 18:21:00 +0100

So I had this idea. The stats pages are great but they show you the stats for a lat/lng bounding box, meaning that my stats for an area will be different from your stats for it since we will have different view sizes, different origins and different bounding boxes. So the idea was that for the stats page, rather than use a bounding box, I’d reverse geocode the origin, get the location as a text string of the country and administrative area (posh term for town) and use that to find all the attractions (and thus stats) within that area.

Sounded like a sound plan, until I tried to reverse geocode all 44,000 attractions in the database and hit on Google’s usage quota. Not that that in itself is a problem, but thinking of the future, I don’t want to build something that relies on using a service that might run out of quota, cos then no one gets their stats until the next day.

So that stats are staying as they are for now. I might make it so that the bounding boxes snap to a larger grid or something in the future, I’ll have to think about it some more.

I am however still going to reverse geocode all of the attractions, just over a number of days to keep Google happy. This data will be stored and used to display on each attractions page just so that you know where it is and so that you don’t confuse all the St Mary’s Churches that there are out there (and I’m sure it’ll have some other future uses).

I’ve just added and turned on an Attraction of the Day auto-tweeter to post a random place...

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:00:55 +0100

I’ve just added and turned on an Attraction of the Day auto-tweeter to post a random place every day to this stream

Fifty of Britain's best-kept secrets

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 10:03:53 +0100

With the Easter bank holiday coming up next weekend, the Telegraph have a top 50 list of attractions in the UK.

So, since we’re about putting attractions on the map, here’s a quick to.uri.st map of some of the listed attractions:

Tweaked some CSS, and added a Twitter and FF call to action to the add/edit success page, hint hint

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:05:15 +0100

Tweaked some CSS, and added a Twitter and FF call to action to the add/edit success page, hint hint

The links in the new Google gadget we broken, oops sorry, all fixed now

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 23:05:15 +0100

The links in the new Google gadget we broken, oops sorry, all fixed now

I’ve given in and set up to.uri.st with it’s own Twitter account (with a terrible...

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:42:00 +0100

I’ve given in and set up to.uri.st with it’s own Twitter account (with a terrible username, dots aren’t allowed) which I’ll be using to keep site related stuff out of my stream.

There are two kinds of statistics, the kind you look up and the kind you make up.

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 22:06:00 +0100

So what’s with this new “stats” link in the site navigation?

It’s an page that shows stats about the current view of the map or of the site as a whole depending on whether you’re zoomed into an area or not.

“But what stats are there?” I hear you cry, or maybe “stats are boring, why do I care about stats?” Well these stats are super fun, honest, not only do they show the number of attractions and edits, the recent changes and activity over time, and the top editor in that region, but they also have current velocity of the area as an animal.

The velocity is a representation of the number of edits to attractions over time, so the more edits the more recently, the higher the velocity and the faster the animal. So for example, the whole site is currently a Greyhound.

http://www.travelblogs.com/site-news/99-of-the-best-travel-blogs

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:31:47 +0100

http://www.travelblogs.com/site-news/99-of-the-best-travel-blogs:

The TravelBlogs blog has a massive list of, yes you guessed it, travel related blogs if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/to-uri-st

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:14:46 +0100

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/to-uri-st:

I’ve removed the importing of recent changes from to.uri.st and the wiki to the blog since this was causing the re-posting of these items to the blog feed so they ended up twice in things like FriendFeed. I have however created a FriendFeed room for to.uri.st that aggregates everything.

Site update live

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:49:51 +0000

After a couple of weeks worth of hacking the new frontend code for the site is live. It’s been quite a substantial change to the Javascript but you probably won’t notice any difference, although hopefully the site will be faster. If you find any errors or have any problems, let me know.

There is one new feature, the new little “stats” link in the top nav, but I’ll tell you more about it another day.

Jay Kerr altered the title and description of "Fort Salem Theater"

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:05:39 +0000

Jay Kerr altered the title and description of "Fort Salem Theater"