Posted by Randy
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:29:00 GMT
On the political front, both the McCain and Obama campaigns have been working overtime in the projected battleground states. If you are seeing presidential adds on TV or hearing them on local radio, don’t expect them to stop any time soon. I know that in Denver, both McCain and Obama are on TV already. It looks like the 2008 Presidential race is going to be the longest and most expensive in history, so dig in for a lot more political adds.
Posted in Politics | Tags 08, bars, convention, democrat, denver, Election, McCain, national, Obama, shops | no comments
Posted by Randy
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:28:00 GMT
The first Convention related map I have posted is a collection of my favorite bars, restaurants, and clubs I recommend and enjoy going to in and around the Downtown/ LODO area. I am not, however, familiar with were to go out for food, or drink, in the Denver Tech Center area. I am using this as an open invitation for people to post recommendations of their favorite places in the DTC as a guide to the delegates that will be staying in that part of town. Also, I am looking forward to reading the comments posted by our users about my favorite spots downtown.
Posted in Events, Politics, Urban | Tags 08, bars, convention, democrat, denver, Election, McCain, national, Obama, shops | no comments
Posted by Randy
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 23:11:00 GMT
Over the last few weeks more information has become available regarding the 2008 Democrat National Convention, being held in Denver, Colorado. This is not the first time Denver has hosted the Democrat National Convention. We were host to the convention in 1908. A lot has changed in those 100 years, and I am trying to create content on Mapbuzz that will help the attendees of the convention enjoy all of the dining, drinking, and cultural experiences Denver has to offer.
Posted in Politics, Urban | Tags 08, bars, convention, democrat, denver, Election, McCain, national, Obama, shops | no comments
Posted by Anders
Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:10:00 GMT
Many of you have asked for the ability to download maps to either GPS devices or Google Earth. We're happy to say we now support both formats.
To download a map you first need to login (this is a temporary solution to stop bots from constantly downloading maps). Then go to your map, and click the "Edit" button under the map title. That will take you to the map page, where you'll see a "Download" button, also under the title. From there you can pick which ever format you prefer.
KML
KML is used by Google Earth, which is a freely available 3D map browser. Thus, you can see how you map looks in a 3D environment. That is particularly helpful for hiking and biking rides where you can preview the route, see what the scenery looks like and get a better feel for elevation gains and losses. This has all of the data from the map, so for any general usage, this is the best format to choose.
GPX
Most GPS receivers can hold tracks and waypoints, and GPX is a popular file format for transferring this data to and from different GPS devices. We already support uploading GPX files to MapBuzz, and now we support downloading GPX files which allows you to load a map onto a GPS device.
This is useful for hikes and bike rides, or anytime you are going off road and want to make sure that you stay on the trail. Since all features from the map are put into the GPX file, any notes or special locations that people have added to the map are converted into either tracks or waypoints.
ESRI Shapefile
ESRI Shapefiles are the classic format for transferring data between Geographic Information Systems (GIS). A shape file is actually three files-in one, so to simplify things we zip the files together so you only have to download one file. Unless you're a GIS professional, you probably won't be interested in this format.
Posted in Social Mapping, Development | Tags geodata, gps, gpx, kml, shapefile | 2 comments
Posted by Doug
Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:06:00 GMT
For anyone interested, here is a highly technical peak into MapBuzz. We have a central concept of items. Not everything is an item, but most things are -- maps, features, users, communities, comments, notes, even locations (although they aren't stored in the database, but generated on the fly by a geocoder). This allows us to have a common set of data for everything. One example is "articles," which we use for map descriptions, user profiles and comment bodies. Other examples are permissions, ratings and geometries.
It's a handy system, and works fairly well -- we just use the hooks we need, when we need them. But, occasionally, it has gotchas. For instance, when deleting comments we forgot to delete their items. That can cause problems - say a search returns some of these partial comments - the unsurprising result is an error.
This is partly a symptom of something else -- items were a late addition. Originally, maps, features, users and communities were their own thing, as well as comments. When we changed over to items, the code for displaying them also changed. That change happened long ago, but ever so often we run into an unanticipated side effect like this one.
But now they're fixed again, and we've got tests in place to make sure they stay fixed.
Posted in Development | Tags architecture, comments, database, development, items, notes | no comments
Posted by Anders
Thu, 15 May 2008 19:47:00 GMT
We've had icons for a while, allowing you to upload images to decorate maps, features, and your account. Due to popular demand, we've now added the ability to add photos images to features and maps.
The maximum pictures size is now 640x640. Unlike the smaller image sizes, this large size isn't cropped to be a square. Thus, nothing will be cut out of the image.
Here is what the "Feature Photos" looks like in the feature viewer:
Next up is a photo browser, that lets you see browse through photos using their larger size.
Posted in Social Mapping, Development, Infrastructure | Tags development, feature, icon, image, photo, picture | no comments
Posted by Doug
Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:07:00 GMT
[with thanks to Charlie Savage for contributing to this post]
We've had a news feeds on the site for some time now. Unfortunately, as the site has grown, we realized our original design wasn't fast enough, particularly for large communities like the Colorado Mountain Club and NTEN. So it was time for a redesign.
Our news system consists of two concepts - events and notifications. Events happen when a user performs some action on the site, say, creates a map. Notifications are the individual items that make up a news feed. The big difference is that events are generic while notifications are targeted to specific users. To understand the need for this distinction, its easiest to go through an example. When you create a map, the notification in your news feed will be different than the notification your friends see.
Ideally, notifications can be generated on the fly from events, allowing you to have full and accurate information for every situation. But that turns out be slow. Very slow. Since notifications are viewed many times more than they are created, our original implementation was designed for fast retrieval and slow creation. To do that, we created all the notifications at the time of each event and store them into tables for later retrieval.
Of course, this ultimately ended up being a problem. Over time, we started using notifications in ways that we didn't expect. For example, they became a big part of our integration with Facebook and Twitter. We also added new ways of viewing them on the site that the original design didn't envision. Most of all, we didn't plan on having communities with thousands and thousands of users quite as soon as we did. As these problems came up, we fixed the quick and easy things - such as generating notifications in background processes so as to not slow down user requests. But it wasn't enough, and it was time for a major redesign.
Our basic premise remained the same - fast read and slower creation. But we needed to significantly improve notification creation times so that we could generate thousands of them at a time. We did that by storing the original events along with the notifications. That allowed us to move all the notification creation code into SQL, thereby vastly speeding up creation times.
Although it seems, and is, a simple change, it of course rippled throughout the system since notifications are used in so many places. Luckily one of our mantras from the beginning of MapBuzz is as complete test coverage as we can manage. So although it turned out to be more painful change than we thought, we had a good idea at most times of what still needed to be fixed.
And now that we've done it, the notification system is once again fast. It's not perfect, of course (no one can ever really afford perfection), but it's good enough for now.
Posted in Development | no comments
Posted by Randy
Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:07:00 GMT
One of the greatest challenges I face when covering the Presidential Election for mapbuzz.com is getting the campaigns to talk to me. You will notice that the event information for both Senators Clinton and McCain are more in-depth than those of Senator Obama. This is because, after months of attempting to speak, write, e-mail, and smoke signal the Obama campaign press staff, they've totally ignored me. In less than 24 hours after starting to cover the race the McCain press people started emailing me everything they send to the press. The Clinton press people now send me EVERYTHING as well. But Obama not so much. So if you happen to know the right people at the Obama campaign to talk to, let me know.
Posted in Politics | Tags ’08, 2008, atkinson, Barack, campaign, Clinton, Election, Election, election_08, Hillary, Huckabee, John, McCain, Mike, Obama, presidential, primary, randy, ratkins | no comments
Posted by Charlie
Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:57:00 GMT
Phew. Beta 2 of MapNotes, our first Facebook application, is finally done. Last week we released the first version to testers, and since then we've been busy fixing various usability issues that our testers have pointed out. If you'd rather hear about all the nitty-gritty technical issues, then head over to my personal blog where I'm running a series of articles about developing for the Facebook platform.
Let's take a look. Here is what MapNotes looked like last week:
An obvious problem is that the map is much too cluttered - the notes cover each other up. A more subtle issue had to do with the ownership links at the top - My Notes, Friend's Notes, Nearby Notes. Splitting your items from your friends' items is fairly standard on Facebook. But it didn't work for us. The main issue was creating a new note when viewing your friend's notes. A user would create note, then pan the map, and the note would disappear! Why? Because the user had asked to see only their friends notes. Not good.
Here's how we solved those two issues:
First, we reduced clutter by only showing one note at a time. The rest of the notes are represented by colored circles on the map. Besides reducing clutter, this approach has another major benefit - its obvious which note is the current note. That important for users that want to add their own comments to a note. Before it was a bit of a mystery which note was active.
Second, we removed the distinction between your notes and your friends notes. Now you see all of them, with your notes having a star in the middle. If you look at the map around Denver, you'll see there is still a clustering issue when zoomed out, but its much better than before.
Although conceptually simple, these two changes took about a week to do. As is often the case, it wasn't the direct work to implement these features that took time. Instead, it was building the underlying infrastructure to support these features that took time. Obviously you'd never be able to tell that from the screenshots, since the notes look exactly the same, don't they? But it required a fairly big rearranging of our code to correctly support all the ways a user can interact with a the notes - mouse overs, clicks, etc.
We still have a few more usability issues to solve, so onto Beta 3!
Posted in Facebook | no comments
Posted by Wilson
Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:48:00 GMT
This week I'll be posting the restaurants and clubs that I hit on my last trip to L.A. The trip was great! I had some great food while I was there. Cafe Brasil and Apple Pan where two clear stand outs. But be sure not to over-look the L.A. Gun Club, where I had some of the most fun I’ve had in a while. My favorite club was Cinespace, where I saw the Dim Mak record label DJing. Them Jeans from Dim Mak was the headliner and he kept me dancing all night to point where I was dripping sweat when I left the club at closing. I also hit up a bunch of hip clothing and shoe stores and one very surprising art book store, all worth checking out.
Some links to get you started:
L.A. Nightlife L.A. Restaurants L.A. Shopping
Posted in Urban | Tags Angeles, Clothing, Clubs, DJs, Food, Illson773, Los, Nightlife, Restaurants, Shopping | no comments
