Friday, March 03, 2006
New stuff
I added some new features today:
- Day notes. The original design was that you went to a lot of different places, and you had a single review and/or note for each. It turns out that it is much more common to go to one place, stay for a couple of days, and keep distinct notes for each day. This was a pain to do in the original design since you had to manually create a copy of the place for each day. So I added "day notes", which are notes that are tied to a place and a specific day. I'm pretty pleased with how well it came out.
- Overall map. (crappy name) This is just a map of the world with a pushpin for every place you've been. It was really simple to code and I don't know why I didn't think of it before since it's such a classic in the real world. Can be slow for frequent travelers though.
- Lat/long setting via Google Maps. If the place name lookup fails, there is no lat/long data and no pretty maps. Boo. The old way to fix this was to lookup the location some other way and then type it in. This was a pain. The new way is that there is an embedded Google map on that page. If you click on somewhere, it fills in the lat/long for you. Much easier.
- Local names. This is still in progress, but the basics are there. Each place will have a primary English name (like Florence) and an optional secondary local language name (like Firenze). The code is there to enter and display it but not much else. The plan is that you will be able to search for either, and that there will be a preference for whether you always want to display local names.
- Backups. I was a bit concerned about my backups, or lack thereof. Especially the database, since you can't just zip up the files for that. I finally did some research and found that Dreamhost does DB and filesystem backups frequently, and end-users have easy access to restoring them. So I'm 90% reassured now. Local backups should take care of the other 10%.
# posted by Dejafu : 8:30 PM
Comments:
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Hey, a propos of the last post, thanks for liking the LibraryThing blog. I wish you much success with this one, and with your idea generally.
Saving this I notice that you've disabled anonymous comments. I think this is a mistake. You can thwart the spammers by turning on that image-identification feature. But anoynymous comments are used all the time on LibraryThing's blog. Embrace the anonymity...
Saving this I notice that you've disabled anonymous comments. I think this is a mistake. You can thwart the spammers by turning on that image-identification feature. But anoynymous comments are used all the time on LibraryThing's blog. Embrace the anonymity...
Oh, I am glad you saw that. You really were an inspiration, as cliched as that may sound. (And if I call it "inspiration", I can steal all kinds of ideas from LibraryThing!)
Also, thanks for the tip on the comments. I didn't really give it much thought when I was setting that bit up, and just picked a bunch of settings. You're definitely right that people won't have blogger accounts and I really don't want to put any barrier in the way of feedback. So anonymous is on.
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Also, thanks for the tip on the comments. I didn't really give it much thought when I was setting that bit up, and just picked a bunch of settings. You're definitely right that people won't have blogger accounts and I really don't want to put any barrier in the way of feedback. So anonymous is on.
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