mobile geocaching australia - beta testing

Discussion about the Geocaching Australia web site
tolmh
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Post by tolmh » 16 June 04 5:05 pm

When I point my LG G5300i at http://mobile.geocaching.com.au I get an 'unknown content' error. I don't have any problems looking at caches at http://rtr.ca/geo :(

Mind Socket
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Post by Mind Socket » 16 June 04 5:26 pm

tolmh, is that device capable as a web browser, or for WAP only (the difference is a somewhat subtle one)? If the latter, it won't work with the HTML mobile gc.com.au. P'haps the other site does both WML and HTML.

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ideology
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Post by ideology » 16 June 04 6:11 pm

tolmh, can you please try opening the page http://mobile.geocaching.com.au/tolmh so we can see what type of request your phone is making. there's no page there, so you'll get an error in any event. thanks

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The Spindoctors
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Post by The Spindoctors » 17 June 04 12:39 am

Is this meant to work on mobile WAP?

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ideology
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Post by ideology » 17 June 04 12:51 am

thanks pesky
spindoc: it doesn't do wap at the moment. we think that's why it doesn't work with tolmh's phone. depending on difficulty/demand, we may be able to modify it to detect a wap phone and change modes accordingly

tolmh
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Post by tolmh » 17 June 04 9:58 am

OK, I've gone to http://mobile.geocaching.com.au/tolmh. I got a 'HTTP status 404' message. The phone is supposed to do GPRS - maybe I don't have it set up properly. I'll have a look around Vodafone's site.

tolmh
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Post by tolmh » 17 June 04 10:08 am

:evil: :x "Currently, Pre Paid customers do not have access to GPRS." :x :evil:

OK, anybody know of a provider who does do GPRS for prepaid customers?

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Post by Mind Socket » 17 June 04 11:03 am

GPRS isn't the problem, that's just a different means of getting to the internet, analagous to using a dial up modem vs a cable modem. I think the lack of a HTML browser on your phone is the problem. WAP, which your phone does have, reads a "language" called WML. It may be possible to create a wap.geocaching.com.au or similar, just need a different content type (not text/html) and write out wml files which look something like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE wml PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD WML 1.1//EN" "/wap/wml.xml">
<wml>
<card id="first_card" newcontext="true">
<p align="center">
<a href="/wap/mainmenu.wml"><img src="images/logo.wbmp" /></a>
</p>
</card>
</wml>

tolmh
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Post by tolmh » 17 June 04 12:55 pm

Ah, gotcha. No, some quick googling reveals that it doesn't have an HTML browser. Have to use the missus' T610 instead. :cry:

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embi
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Post by embi » 17 June 04 6:52 pm

We now have daily automatic updates of the mobile cache site.

BIG THANKS to i! for the work put in to finally get this off the ground.

Ebenezer
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Post by Ebenezer » 03 July 04 3:43 pm

Site looks good! Good work. (Now all I need is that GPRS phone...)

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ideology
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Post by ideology » 07 July 04 9:18 pm

thanks guys

we've added rough locations derived from postcodes. so now when you list caches within a state or near other caches, it tells you what suburb or area they are in. we think it's useful, but perhaps it takes up too much screen real-estate. comments?

we've also added indications for archived and temporarily unavailable caches. please treat this data with a grain of salt (this is still in beta!) - these flags are not as up-to-date as the rest of the data. it's best to look at the latest logs to work out what's what. we will soon be writing a routine which will interpret the logs to work out more accurately the status of an individual cache.

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embi
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Post by embi » 08 July 04 12:19 am

I like the "area" listing.....I couldnt find an archived cache though

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ideology
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Post by ideology » 08 July 04 11:41 am

we've just tagged a few hundred more caches as archived, so you should be able to find a few now

the problem with identifying archived caches is that once they are archived, they disappear from some of the feeds. so we adopted a quick-n-dirty approach based on when we last heard about the cache. if it was too long, we archived it. if we got some wrong, the next time that cache appears in a feed, it will be automatically unarchived.

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