Archive for the 'Mashup' CategoryPage 2 of 4

Today for the mashup thing, I did a bit of work on the main index page where each available city will show up as a marker. So when someone goes to the root of the website, they’ll see a bunch of cities. They can also pick the cities from a drop down menu, too. This required a bit of more javascript and some template files, etc.

I did a little research on the person who did the Google Maps Craigslist mashup like two years ago. Apparently he got a job at Google! While that’s pretty awesome, I can’t see this project doing the same for me, since it’s something that’s already been done (and two years ago, which is an eternity in web time). Rather, I’m just building this for my own use and perhaps for other people who wish there were more cities available in that HousingMaps mashup.

I came up with a name for the application. I was going to call it CraigsMaps, but someone already has that domain name. I’m thinking I should buy the domain name pretty soon, but what if I come up with a cooler name later!? The app should be ready in a couple of days anyway. Depending on how much extra stuff I want to cram in before I “launch” it.

Today I did a bunch of CSS, making the mashup thing actually look kind of nice. Later, I may add some more “Web 2.0″ features such as drop shadows and gradients. I was having a hard time getting the map to show up in the div with a few of the css layouts I downloaded, so I just decided to code it by hand. I think it looks pretty neat; the map stretches across the whole screen and then the other content is shown in absolutely positioned divs.

I also did some stuff with the CakePHP helpers. CakePHP’s inferiority to Rails is really starting to show to me. I think it’s all a product of PHP having not been created for this kind of MVC design. CakePHP tries to follow the conventions of Rails, but it does so in a sort of copycat manner. As such, the result does not meet or exceed the original.

In the case of Helpers, Rails automagically links the named helper to the controller. In CakePHP, you must specify that a certain controller uses a certain helper. It’s kind of annoying. There also isn’t any support for the Rails convention of “partials,” which is why I’m using their helpers to begin with… It’s annoying.

Also, I find it annoying that CakePHP finds an objects associated objects by default when using “find()” or “findAll().” It’s useful when I want it, but when I don’t, it wastes a lot of memory! Now that I think of it, I’m not sure if Rails does this by default or not. The only reason I mention it is because I kept getting out of memory errors (or more accurately, memory limit errors) with my application. It’s a big waste when all I want is the name of the area and CakePHP fetches ALL of the associated listings for that area…

I must sound really whiny right now. I guess it’s just from some frustration in learning a new language/framework instead of using one that I’m used to. It’s good for me, I won’t argue against that. It’s just a bit disappointing to see all of these flaws when a framework is purported to be things like “stable” and “good.”

Oh, and also, I should say that I think my actual mashup is coming along pretty nicely. It should be ready in a few more “days,” where a “day” is one I am actively working on the mashup. I could probably “release” it pretty soon, but usually when I release something, it means I won’t work on it much anymore, moving to something else I find interesting. So I should probably actually have it done before I release it…

I haven’t really been working on the Google Maps and Craigslist mashup very much recently. I blame it on a combination of going to Denver for a wedding, having a huge anime and manga backlog, getting Command and Conquer: Kane Edition, and general laziness. I think that’s a pretty good reason.

Anyway, today I sorta got back into it. As the mashup worked on day 6, the Google map would preload all the stuff within the tabs for the markers. This meant it would poll Craigslist like a billion times in one second to get all of the images preloaded. Guess what? Craigslist doesn’t like that. They put a ban on me (and anyone else who would use the badly implemented map) after loading one page. Luckily it was only a temporary ban.

My solution was to use AJAX to load the tabbed info windows for the markers on demand. So no pictures or anything get loaded until you request them. It’s much nicer to Craigslist, though I don’t know if it’s friendlier to my server, since there’ll be more requests. That’s okay, though.

It was kind of a pain to learn how to grab the xml files and parse them, but I finally got it working. Now all I have to do is generate the xml files for each listing (shouldn’t be hard at all). I’ve already got experience generating xml from the RSS feeds that I make for Notecentric and Anime Nano.

Plus, I get some street cred (maybe) for including AJAX in the site! It’s a requirement of Web 2.0, so I figure I should fulfill it.