Feedback on 43places.com

With the launch of Google Maps’ API, this could really kick ass for extremely localised things to do in Cities.

CloCkWeRX in Adelaide, SA, wants to… Get Drunk… in… Adelaide SA ->
bam, localised pubs from: http://www.getfridged.com/alcoholix/ or google local.

See more progress on: Help test Tootietails: the next new thing from The Robot Co-op

MSDN article with PHP code in it.

Yeah, I'm flabbergasted too.

It's Chandu's pet, and people are adopting it everywhere you can consume SOAP.

Living Under A Rock?

Google Map API is now official.

Note to Self

RatePubs provides XML feeds, free content, and Trust in the Semantic Web.


Woo.

Need to work out a decent InverseFunctionalProperty for pubs:
Name + Suburb + Country
Name + Postcode + Country
Phone Number [fuzzy, fits in with google local]
Homepage
Lat + Lon

Users manually assigning. [ick]

Thoughts, world, on how to smartly provide an IFP for smushing purposes? Ie, being able to say Pub A is the same as Pub B because they share this in common...

Google Earth, Why I'm Excited

Overview.

The coolest feature: KML over a network.

If I can output one set of XML for Google Maps hackery for Alcoholix, surely I can do the exact same thing for Google Earth. Which means I can put any data I like, as a content provider, on Google's platform.


HOT DAMN.

Mapufacture, OpenGuides, More Drinking

OpenGuides category overview in RDF / RSS 1.0 meets Mapufacture. It's impressive stuff! Go and stick the former URL into the later if you need to.

I spent the weekend doing "research" for alcoholix, and the end result is that I added Google Map support to the searches, and pub overview pages.

Unfortunately you can now see the geocoding is just a little off for more than one pub.

Now to find out what happened to the machine my stylesheet was on.

Confusion!

On Friday you'll see how deeply integrated RSS is in the architecture of the browser. But that's just the tip of what may turn out to be a very big iceberg. The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news. Like Audible's NY Times Best Seller list, or an iTunes music playlist, or lists of Sharepoint documents, or browser bookmarks. Lists are all over the place, and people are starting to move them around via RSS, and they are not the usual kind of data that has been carried by RSS in the past.

-Dave Winer

Did he just admit that there's a clear and distinct need for exactly the kind of thing RDF [and by extension, RSS 1.0] is all about? Interoperability of data? Anywhere? No matter what you want to spit out?

Saints be praised, we finally got through.

I think.

Canvas + Maps vs Tile Engine?

Handy.

Drunk Zen

While geocoding some of the new addresses, I found this bar. It's surrounded by a cluster of bloggers. All with msn spaces blogs. And Adam Bosworth.

Accidentally discovering things like the MSNBC building bloggers are kind of fun, and you have to wonder if they all drink at the Blind Tiger Ale House!

The Steps to Alcoholixism

1. 


2. 


3. 


4. 


5. 


6. 

Bathroom Renovation

Tiling, anyone?

Drunks in New York

When I'm king, there's going to be no such thing as "third avenue" which spans half of Manhattan.


I do, however, commend the appending of "ology" to everyday words to make it sound sciency: I'd been calling Get Fridged "foodology" for a while now.

Quite frankly, New York appears filled with bars. I'll be back in a few days after collecting this all!

Busy Day.

Alcoholix 300 venues, showing us that even the French are up for a bit of a night out on the town, Shanti's brief snippet dumped a whole lot of traffic from all over the web, and I found out that the upcoming.org import was horribly broken.

Sort of.

Eek!

Plans now: Expand out data to take on the world!

Launch

I’m hungover, and it’s here: Alcoholix.

This is a service to help you find local bars and pubs in your area, and the people who frequent them. It’s a specialised search service, as well as a content provider for sites like Upcoming.org.

Stay tuned over the coming weekends as I drunkenly roll out new features :)

See more progress on: Become an Alcoholix

AJAX & SVG

Useful, Flashy, Styled, and a small step forward.

This Ajax / Web Development innovation spree is only a good thing. There's growth once again, no longer are we complaining about IE6's defects and hold-us-back-isms. We don't actually care, and we're more than willing to target the enhanced features of one browser to reward users of it.

What I personally can't wait for is when all of these people who are getting their feet wet, or thinking about getting their feet wet with AJAX discover the wonders of SVG.

Or at least, anyone who's ever authored any SVG demos in the past for Adobe's browser plugin gets off their rear end and starts serving up the incorrect correct mime type. Ah, finally, a non mozilla based demo of SVG.

It looks like everything has support for SVG. Opera 8 has SVG support now! Imagine that. So that's IE+Adobe plugin, Gecko, and Opera that I'm aware of. Wikipedia has even more. So, this thing should will take off any day now.

I love my job

First, I built Alcoholix, which made people go "ooh", now I'm working on geocoding addresses and route planning and areas (not "neighbourhoods", but "local government areas"). But, not because I want to, but because work wants me to.

Rock it.

I love this job.

Ikea Cluttr

This... is Cluttr, almost. This is the good half of Cluttr. I knew it was a rocking idea, but it's miserable to think it's unoriginal.

Ditto the office planner.

Infact, there's a whole discussion on it over at 37 signals, worth a glance.

Google Desktop Search

Big whoop. It's a search engine for my desktop. But, it, doesn't, you know, search through the cool stuff I like.

I checked back with the state of the plugins. I can now search my gmail (yay) and IRC conversations all from the same area.


Now, if I were a clever boffin, this would be a handy thing to scutter files and extract RDF about them with.

Today's New Cool Things

StumbleUpon
http://www.stumbleupon.com/

Discovered: Last night.
Saw in various places: All today.

What it does:
I like/hate url X, find me more like it and find me people like me.

Why it's cool:
This is Trust in the Semantic Web for the common user. Plus, it looks better than del.icio.us.


Koders
http://www.koders.com/

Discovered: Just then.

What it does:
Open source search engine. It crawls all sorts of projects to help you reuse code.

Why it's cool:
IBM did a whole big article on Community Source; talking a lot about modularisation of specific components of code and sharing them with everyone. This is just like that, except its going to get more market share because the hurdles to using it are so much lower.

Drunken Stickers

Yet another Graphedia article. I haven't tried it, but I love the idea of it. It's one of those Next Big Things that I'm just not sure about - ie, podcasting, though popular, is something we could never do at Fresh FM.

Now, I'm much more of the kind of person who wants to more directly overlay the internet world onto the real one. Plazes style. I'm wondering if Graphedia style marketing at bus stops in the area would be a cool way to promote alcoholix.

Stuff I want to do to Alcoholix:

• Upcoming events for venues
  
• More data, all across Australia
• Using a feedreader API of some kind to collect and smush 'localised' RSS 1.0 from the nearest blogs.
• Plan a large, long, twisted pub crawl that's the most effective way of getting from place to place.

What do we all think? What does Alcoholix need most?

Pie Charts

Working with two tiers of management has given me a newfound respect for the humble pie chart.

So what's a PHP guy to do? JpGraph.

I can't show you any of the interfaces of the app that we've used them on, but it's so sharp and clear. This thing is pretty darned versatile too.

Feeding It Up The Line

Remember geourl?

Alcoholix pages now sport ping / geourl stuff automagically, as well as in RDF/XML, and also with multimap.com support. So, indirectly, I've just married up a whole lot of bloggers with a whole lot of drinking.

It's powered by google - I just add more sites, google comes along and follows all of the links, forcing my data to be republished in geourl, etc: Neither the guy who runs GeoUrl or myself have to do a thing!

Cool idea thing to do with the feeds from geourl is to render them all on feedmap - even if the RDF is a bit shaky.

XUL Semweb Killer App Thought

MAB is nifty. I've seen it before, and if I actually shopped on Amazon, I'd use it. Pity I'm a cheapskate.

What I just noticed, and quite liked, was the "Export XML" feature in the menu. Now, what if it was an "export RDF/XML" that dumped into piggy-bank or its shared store cousin?

Useful.

Willpower to implement it: 0

Other news: added the ability to publish data onto upcoming.org, as well as update from upcoming.org to alcoholix. For a sunday and a lunch break of whipping it all together, it's coming along nicely. Thanks to Rhiannan's studious work, we're now up to 80 or so geographically mapped pub locations.

Woo.

Have a tinker if you like, it's very shaky and easy to break, but the more feedback I get, the more I'll do it on. Current feature I'd most like to implement: Pubcrawl Planning & Map Maker.

A bit of progress into Alcoholism

Look, pretty RDF and random pubs!

I've loaded 30 test cases into the database, prototyped out some interfaces, made an "add pub" form, and decided I'm approximately half way to having a these-are-your-local-pubs lookup by blog url.

There's a few cool things that need to come into the BlogMap API, like lookup by lat/lon, but hey, it's a start!

I've even bashed out a quick little PEAR style php library for BlogMap [Services_Blogmap], which I'll delay releasing until there's a little bit more to work with (2 methods does not a web service SDK make :S)

Things left todo:

• Add: Validate
• Add: Image Upload
• Refactor to multiple tables.
• Add, map to chefmoz
• Add, get details *from* chefmoz
• About
• Design
• View Blog
• View Metro
• View Metro RDF
• View Blog RDF
• SVG + XSLT to apply to raw results (insert noises of ooerr about here).
  

... plus a bunch of views and such. I reckon I can knock this off after work tommorrow, and set about extensively testing the "where's the nearest pub to me" functionality.

This Weekend's Project

Rip all content from this site and publish it as RDF. Mix in Chefmoz and Upcoming.org information at will. Simmer for a few days. Drink until liver is dead. Possibly (ab)use the BlogMap API stuff to find "the pub nearest to me" for any blog.

Deer Hunting

It's hunting season in Deer Park.

Features for web developers, end users, extension developers, cool bug fixes.

Demonstration of the ever so sexy "canvas"

All about SVG in gecko

SVG samples for gecko

What's it all mean? The web is now officially a bit cooler. We can now draw in javascript with SVG + canvas. We can now mix and match, say, SVG and RDF with XSLT to create cool applications on the fly. No more flash between you and the good stuff. Hurrah.

Linkpost

Mindset - intent driven search from yahoo that sorts results more towards shopping or reasearch.

Semantic Bank - think of something like del.icio.us for sharing all of your information - from contacts, to places, to movies, to reviews - many hands make the work go faster. It's from the same people who brought us Piggy-Bank.

Upcoming SDKs are progresssing nicely. I still don't know if anyone has built anything with Services_Upcoming yet aside from me - a new version is in the works, I just need to put the unit tests together over the weekend and push it out to the world. This thing now has Cache_Lite built in, so its a hell of a lot faster.

Finally, I sat down and tried to pick up Rails again. It's night number two after work, and it's not so bad - I'll write up a few from PHP to Ruby posts one of these days.

Feedmap Makes Me Hungry

Move on over, google maps. You're cute, but I want coverage of where I am! And feedmap just gave me that.

It's smart, I was a little wary at first I admit, because I didn't want to have to do something tricky, but it goes with the tried and tested geourl "ICBM" method of geocoding, it's simple, and... hell, it works.


It's even got a decent API.

I think its time for some more php soon! Plazes + Geourl + Feedmap...

To see it in action, check out the "blogmap" button in my sidebar. Cheers James!

Google Earth

For some time I’ve wanted to do exactly what Google has now done.

Beaten by google, but wooo hooo!

Awesome screenshots.

I love it.

See more progress on: photograph the whole of adelaide