Official nls blog
Adding features is serious business
Getting geokit ip location and geo sorting of location results took a little longer than expected...no real surprise there. Its kinda funny how each new piece of functionality requires some sort of redesign. Its as if new data demands new viewing requirements.
whats been going on here?
good question. not much i guess.
went to jazzfest 2010 which was a multi day drunken blast.
but not much in producing output or productivity.
so when i got back, i was ready to make some kind of change to the site.
what i did was add facebook login making it easier for people to interact with the site.
of course no one really interacts with the site now. but you now...for the future
still have a ton of features id like to add, and the more locations i add, the more features i think of.
i dont think this site will ever be complete
well what do you know...events can work
What a long month this has been. My assumptions for adding criteria and events was WAY off. I thought I'd get them both done in about a week. Turns out criterias alone was one week and events was close to 4!In that time, I changed models, migrations, techniques and even learned a few things along the way. And thats the while point right now, getting experience and learn how to get a site running using Ruby Rails. Well, I'd like to go into more detail about the trials and tribulations getting into events, but I'm a little tired right now.
And Jazzfest is coming up.
Criterias say what?
Taking a little bit longer and incorporating more functionality than I anticipated, the long awaited and overdue 'criterias' are here. Now, you can (or I for the most part) can assign criterias to the locations, allowing user the ability to search...just not yet today. Having criteria to search and distinguish between the different types of places is mandatory. Now i just need to build a search engine for this thing to really get the most out of it. So yeah, add search to the list of things to do.
jQuery getting started
Its been years since I was a web developer. And apparently I missed out on jQuery framework goodness. Rather than build custom javascripts for common features, jQuery has built in functionality across all browsers for one stop whiz bang do it all js coding. It will be a learning curve, as is the case with everything on this site. But it has been integrated into some form validation and lightbox features for the flickr neighborhood pics. Every day, one step closer.
Ratings, reviews, flickr links...oh my
Having a listing of locations wasn't really that interesting and on the way to creating a description, I opted to go the rating/review route. Rather than just one person control the description of a location, I decided to let every user have their say what is aplace is like. I guess you can call those 'reviews', or at least I will. There are now a ton of more things to do now. Why is it the more I do, the more I need to do?
geolocated images using flickr
As soon as I added the locations, I wanted to get images for them. But traveling across the globe to every bar isn't in my initial budget, so i'll have to cheat. Using the coordinates from the addresses, I'm searching Flickr for images nearby. The radius for the search is jacked up as some locations don't have any geotagged photos in their area. I'm adding this on the list to see how to get better geolocated image search results.
now with locations
As if you could run a nightlife website without locations... It's pretty basic for now, you add a name and an address and I'll put it on a map. Later, categories / criteria / ratings / images / events and more will added to locations to make them useful. But hey, its a start. added functionality uses geokit for geocoding and lat lng coordinates.
first official post in the official blog
Well...after a few years, thenightlifesite.com is finally getting back up and running. It's been a while an I expect this to take a few weeks before really being useful but I'm going to try to enforce a 'once a week feature update' along with feature update blog posts. Hopefully, over time, these series of feature updates will result in a fully functional night life website.
We'll see.