garbagescout blog

For those interested in the technical side of things, the backend code of about three quarters of the garbagescout site has been rewritten. Let me know if you see any bugs. The main change you will see for now is that the URLs are different. They are neater.

The other change you will see is that the home URL is garbagescout.com/ny. AHA!, you may say to yourself. Yes, things are going on behind the scene. If you live outside of New York City and want to try garbagescout, please let me know. You can be in on the test of the new nationwide ’scout!

New features today are a more permanent login, where once you’ve signed in you will stay signed in for more than a couple of hours, and an atom feed by user id or user name!

To use the atom feed, construct the URL like this: http://garbagescout.com/atom.php?uid=10, where 10 is your user ID. IF you don’t know your user id, just do this: http://garbagescout.com/atom.php?user=jim (replacing ‘jim’ with your own user name).

I may have introduced some bugs into the atom feed, as I notice the last few posts haven’t showed up in my feed reader. I’ll try to fix those now.

Alpha!

So, in working on the expansion to other cities in the US, one casualty is that “Not on map” posts are gone. If the computer can’t find your address, it won’t show up. I hope to introduce a feature in the next few days to deal with this - a form that lets you, the user, fix addresses that are broken. Until then, please bear with me.

I’ve hacked out a pretty basic modification to the atom feed for new garbage posts: a search parameter. Construct the URL like this:
http://garbagescout.com/atom.php?search=brooklyn
or
http://garbagescout.com/atom.php?search=bike.

Right now, you can only have one search term. Still, might be useful to someone.

At the suggestion of GarbageScout user Swerzzz, there is now a email-to-a-fiend form on each detail page, like this. Yes, now not only are our streets full of weird stuff people have discarded, you can email pictures of it to your friends.

By the way, thanks very much to the two users of GarbageScout with whom I am not personally acquainted. You are helping keep it going while I promote like crazy and try to get more users.

… is coming soon. Very soon. I’m learning more about latitude and longitude than I ever wanted to know. Well, that’s not true. Maps are cool.

Also note that there is a new icon. Nobody’s been asking for that, but you have to admit it’s also cool.

Foundcity is awesome. Very similar to what I’m doing here, without the garbage. They have somehow figured out the Google Maps stuff. The idea is that you see something interesting on the street, and share the location and a photo using the Foundcity site. Even the email format is similar, but they use a : instead of an @ to separate the description and location. That’s actually better. The @ is confusing, because it’s used for email addresses.

I’ve added a Google Maps link to the index and details pages. The real challenge is to figure out how you can do a search by neighborhood. Many people want this feature, but it’s not so easy with Google because they do not offer geocoding.

Thanks to all who have made suggestions and pointed out bugs. You’ll notice that the FAQ has been hanged a bunch. There are some behind-the-scenes changes as well.

A major are that needs attention is the creation of accounts. I hope that this is at least clearer than it was before. Right now there’s a one-to-one relationship between email addresses and accounts. That will change soon as the user account management bit gets a bit more filled out.

That’s the type of stuff that tends to interest programmers and bore everyone else. For the rest of you, make some more posts! Test it out! Break it!