New features are now live!
Tue, 13/10/2009 - 20:35 — matt
I'm very pleased to announce that the new features that i've been working on for quite a while are now ready.
*Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work in Firefox on any platform, a workaround on firefox at the moment is to right click on the star image and select "Properties" from the menu. In the displayed window you will then see a Title attribute with the text that should be displaying
New Search Page
- The search page has been updated to include a bigger map.
- Users can now press enter/return key from "Location" or "Radius" Field instead of moving the pointer to the "Find Postbox" button.
Edit a postbox
- Registered users can now edit any postbox in the database.
- Move the postbox location with a map marker to the new location
- Users can upload an image of the postbox (restrictions apply)
New Contribute Page
- Completely redesigned contribute feature
- Moved form outside of the map interface, (it would be too big for the map)
- Users can display existing postboxes in the area that they want to add a new one to avoid duplication
- Form validation
- User input for Lat/Lng fields
- Registered users can upload an image of the postbox (restrictions apply)
Site wide improvements
- Completely redesigned Google Maps infowindow on all clickable postbox markers
- Postbox rating system. Registered users can verify that a postbox exists. This is displayed as a star rating in the infowindow of the postbox. (TIP: Leaving your mouse pointer over the star rating will display the number of users who have verfied*) When a registered user adds a postbox the postbox will automatically receive a one star rating
- New Box No. Field
- New Listed By Field
- New PostBoxr ID displayed for each postbox. (use this number for referring to postboxes to request deletion)
- As mentioned above, users can upload images of postboxes. At present only one image per postbox. The image is displayed as a thumbnail in the infowindow and when clicked the user can see a larger version. The uploaded pictures overwrite the previous versions in the database, so please be sure that your photo is better than the existing version
*Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work in Firefox on any platform, a workaround on firefox at the moment is to right click on the star image and select "Properties" from the menu. In the displayed window you will then see a Title attribute with the text that should be displaying
Comments
Deletions
About two months ago, I requested that you delete a load of boxen that I found to be duplications. These don't appear to have been actioned yet. I will move them all to the North Pole (Lat 90, Long 0) so they don't corrupt the search results.
Have you gone on a walkabout again ?
OpenID
The link to the OpenId Login is still reporting "the requested page could not be found". Then, when I try to do a conventional login, it says that it's not a valid OpenId !
Reply
I'll have a look into this.
UPDATE:
I've found the problem (javascript conflict) and am trying to fix it. The only pages affected are Search, Contribute and Browse. You can log in via openid by using any other page until it's fixed.
New editing facilities
The new editing facilities are really quite good. I spent all night manually making a load of accumulated changes for "my" postboxen, that I'd contribbed over the past year.
Some points though:
The XML download file doesn't seem to include the new fields. This makes it a bit difficult to automate the detection of those sans box number.
The XML file has a spurious character at the beginning; it can't be read directly into (some) of my XML editing tools. I can manually correct this but loading a file this large into notepad (to edit it) is asking for trouble.
What's happening with the images ? I've resized my images accordingly and have uploaded a few. When I look at them (the large version) subsequently, they seem to be very heavily compressed, fuzzy and indistinct. Are you doing any additional compression on them ?
Can you augment the searching logic so that you can enter a postbox database ident, so that I can go straight to the one(s) I need to edit.
Richard [in SG1]
Reply
The issue that you were having with the on demand XML download has been fixed.
The images are processed during upload to try and keep the file sizes down.
If you want access to the edit feature directly you can use the following URL:-
"http://www.postboxr.co.uk/edit?id=##"
Changing "##" to the PostBoxr ID that you would like to edit.
Duplicate Detection
I've run an excel script on the XML download and have found 1500+ pairings of postboxen which are <300m apart. I wasn't expecting this many !
Anyway, of those, about 200 are less than 100m apart, and around 30 are straight duplicates (<1m apart)
If I provide a list of these (after manual filtering, because some may be legitimate) can you do the deletions ?
This business of http://www.postboxr.co.exit?id=xxx doesn't work for me, because it only allows viewing of a single postbox. What I'd like to do is to type in the postboxr ident of a given postbox (as in searching) and see it along with its neighbors, to check for any duplications and then edit it/them if appropriate.
Update
Box number has now been added to the download formats. It will show up in the daily XML feed tomorrow.