Archive for the 'MapsKrieg' Category

So I worked on the mashup quite a bit yesterday. So much that when I was done, I was too tired to write a blog entry about it. I mostly spent yesterday buying the domain name, upgrading my server, and getting the project to work on my “production” server. It wasn’t too difficult; I just needed to move the database, change some names, and make sure there weren’t any old names being used. I also started adding all of the cities on CraigsList to the database. At least, the US ones.

This took a lot of time to do manually. I had to figure out if the area was an actual city, or a bunch of cities, then figure out the geo coordinates, and stuff it into the database. I thought it might be faster to do it by hand than write a script. Nope.

Today I wrote a script that would make the entry faster by automagically getting the coordinates from Google Maps’ http request service. It still took a while, but today I finished inserting almost all of the US cities (excluding the combination ones, since Google can’t do those).

Now all that’s left is for me to make the pop up windows a little prettier, and maybe add a list of the CraigsList listings to the side for easy browsing by price, # of bedrooms, etc. That shouldn’t take too long. Then I can launch the site!

I guess this should count as the project’s 10th and 11th day, though I didn’t really spend too much time on either day, so let’s just roll them into one. After doing some CSS to overlay some divs over the Google Map, I found out there’s another way to do this: with “custom controls.”

The way that the custom controls work is both pretty sweet, and not that great. I don’t like having to add content to them by using javascript. It just doesn’t seem “correct” to do so, since I’m just overlaying normal html. So I’ll be using some custom controls, and some divs. The good thing about custom controls is that the map knows not to open infowindows under them when they’re opened up.

Besides that, I just did a lot of random work on getting the app to look a little better. Like showing the correct area based on which city’s listing you want to see. Overall, the project is coming along really smoothly, with very few roadblocks. I’m happy that it’s nearing completion. I really enjoy doing these one-man projects, since it lets me get experience in everything from database schema planning and optimizing, to php backend development, to designing the css for the content, and even maybe a little tweaking in the Apache server. I think once I add this project to my “real” server, I’ll need to get a ram upgrade.

I think the project should probably be ready to go live within a week. I dunno if I’ll actually try to get the word out, or just release it and see if people find it via Google or something. That’d be cool. Since there’s already a site that does a similar thing (though there’s a smaller number of supported cities), I don’t think what I’m doing is really that noteworthy. I think it’d be useful, though, so we’ll see if there’s any reaction at all to it.

I spent a whole lotta time today trying to get caching working with CakePHP. Apparently, CakePHP doesn’t do caching quite as gracefully as Rails when it comes to custom routing, especially in the application root. Yeah, there’s a bug. I thought I was doing something wrong though, so it took me forever to find out it was actually a bug (or is it a “feature?”).

Besides that, I got the interface to what it was previously, except with AJAX so that the Craigslist images are only downloaded when you click on a map marker. I also found that it takes a long time to put a week’s worth of listings (from Ann Arbor, at least) onto the map at once. I’m guessing there were at least 400 on there. I made a hard limit to the number of listings that show up, and it loads a lot faster now.

I’m sort of back into the mood for working on this project again. I finally beat the Scrin campaign (it was really short) in Command and Conquer 3, so I’ll definitely be more focused now. I think.