mobile geocaching australia - beta testing

Discussion about the Geocaching Australia web site
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ideology
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mobile geocaching australia - beta testing

Post by ideology » 15 June 04 1:44 pm

as embi mentioned some time ago, we have been developing a mobile geocaching site
it is now ready for beta-testing

the aim is to allow cachers to quickly and cheaply get key information while out in the field

it features:
- automatic updates from the roblisa feed
- searches by waypoint, name and state
- links to mini-maps
- clean design to fit on small screens and minimise costly mobile bandwidth

chec out Mobile Geocaching Australia and let us know what you think!

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embi
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Post by embi » 15 June 04 1:58 pm

Woohoo exactly what we need...

It has short list which solves the problem that optus creates by not allowing large (>22K) downloads.

And so what format will the cache pages be in??

You can see what I have been using lately at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~mengland/wap/107928.htm

It also has a link for the log text to reduce downloads.

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Post by ideology » 15 June 04 2:13 pm

glad you like it!

the cache pages should be visible by clicking on the name of the cache
is the link working?

here's the current layout for the cache you mentioned
http://mobile.geocaching.com.au/cache/GCHD3F

we like your idea of a link to the logs to reduce bandwidth!

our log data is older than yours. the roblisa feed does not include logs so we need to look at a way of getting the latest logs

oops, we aren't displaying hints - we'll need to fix that

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Post by embi » 15 June 04 2:15 pm

interesting....the cache pages dont show up on the PC web browser but they do on the phone....

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Post by embi » 15 June 04 2:17 pm

I am willing to send you a daily gpx file from gc.com. for each state.

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Post by Mind Socket » 15 June 04 2:18 pm

Looks good! Same problem here, I think it's a missing </title> tag

- Rog

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Post by ideology » 15 June 04 2:20 pm

oops! we've fixed the </title> bug. thanks mind socket!

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Post by Mind Socket » 15 June 04 2:30 pm

2 mins to resolve!?!? Don't forget to breath, boys. :)

This will be great once I get a BT + GPRS phone and get caught out without the latest updates in the PDA. Geeky gadget geocaching goodness.

I better revisit that RSS feed idea again, could I have a looksee at your database and I'll rustle (or peetr :roll: ) up some perl code based on the work I did before. Alternatively, I can send you what I have already (it used to scrape gc.com, just need to slap a DB query in front instead).

- Rog

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Post by The S's » 15 June 04 3:25 pm

Hi

This will be great when it is complete ...

I don't know if this problem is because it is beta test, but I have just looked at the caches available in the ACT, many caches that are no longer available for various reasons are appearing in the cache list, then when you click on these some standard details such as co-ordinates, name etc appear without any clues or logs.

An example is Sick Puppy's, it appears on this list page although the cache was archived at least 6 months ago.

Hope this helps, look forward to using this in the future.

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Post by ideology » 16 June 04 9:08 am

thanks for the feedback

log links: we've adopted embi's suggestion to reduce bandwidth by taking the logs off the main page. there's now a summary that sits on the cache page because you usually just want to know whether it was found recently. naturally, you can click on a log item to view it.

hints: hints are now enabled, however, you can't see any because there are none in the database. these will be coming soon.

text scrubbing: we do some minor text scrubbing. firstly, we deliberately break certain html tags in the short description, long description and log text. the main tag is the one that produces background images which you don't want to download on a mobile. other offending tags try to change the title of the page, etc. secondly, we break email addresses to geocaching.com.au because some people had put their geocaching.com.au email address in cache logs. putting your email address on the web is a bad idea because it attracts spam that pounds whatever server is handling your email. (in this case, ours!) therefore email addresses to geocaching.com.au are obfuscated.

archived caches: the roblisa feed doesn't contain the archived or temporarily unavailable flags. when a cache gets archived, it simply disappears from that list. we don't want caches to disappear because it's often useful to know that a new cache is in the same area as an old cache, so we keep all cache data we can get our hands on. as proof of concept we overlaid the archived and temporarily unavailable flags from some old data that we had lying around. as a result, you can now see some caches with a line through them, and when you click on them it says "potentially archived" or "potentially unavailable." do not rely on these flags because they are old! happily, the cache logs are coded with explicit log types which tell you whether it's been archived, so once we get a cache log feed going, we'll be able to automatically toggle the available flag.

log feed: thanks for your offers of help. we like the idea of a gpx data feed because it is less bandwidth intensive and more error resistant that screen scraping, plus offers redundancy if we get gpx files from multiple sources. we are developing this feed so it is, err, coming soon!

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Post by The Rats » 16 June 04 10:40 am

One question: I brought up the front page and then clicked on the NSW page, picking a cache at random I clicked on the "House on the hill" cache and then the nearby caches link.
This is where question starts, It shows that a large number of the caches are archived or possibly archived when I know they aren't..... Why is this.

Otherwise looks good guys - Thanks for the hardwork & effort.

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Post by ideology » 16 June 04 10:48 am

the archived/unavailable fields are old data. we are developing a new feed which will keep these fields up-to-date. at the moment it is displayed as proof-of-concept.

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Post by Mind Socket » 16 June 04 11:06 am

I don't think I explained my RSS feed idea properly. I used to have code that would list the latest caches in an area by scraping a single cache list page from GC.com and spitting out the results in RSS/XML. I was thinking the code could be ported to provide a "syndicated feed" from the gc.com.au database (instead of page scraping) of the latest caches in each state. Essentially, it would be a page like:
http://mobile.geocaching.com.au/search/?s=NSW

but in RSS/XML form and with a couple more details. This can be used with any RSS aggregator (live on-screen updates, in Outlook, as a "friend" on Livejournal ...)

Maybe I should just send the source code :)
- Rog

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Post by ideology » 16 June 04 11:17 am

oh, we didn't realise you were talking about publishing. that's a great idea. yes, please send us what you have so we can merge it in!

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Post by Mind Socket » 16 June 04 11:35 am

Done.
- R

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