Geocaching Australia

Does the Planned caches list actually serve any purpose? So far the only interaction I can see is that you can plot them on a map of the whole of Australia. Should be able to plot on a map per state but that wouldn't work for me? Ubuntu/8.10 (intrepid) Firefox/3.0.5

I would like to be able to view my planned caches on Google maps and send a link of that to other people (hey these are caches I want to do, any of them interest you?)

Excellent suggestion.
I'll take this on and get back to you when it's ready (maybe a day or two).

caughtatwork wrote:I'll take this on and get back to you when it's ready (maybe a day or two).

What?! Up to two days for a change from C@W?

This must involve a complete redesign of the entire database!

Oh, now you've just thrown down the gauntlet.
Let me see what I can pull out of the code bottle before bed time (that givs me about 3 hours).

A little under 2 hours

http://geocaching.com.au/cacher/caughtatwork/hotlists

You can also access the same detail from your own "my" watchlists, e.g. http://geocaching.com.au/my/hotlist/recommended/

Click on the little map next to the type of hotlist and (almost) instant Google Map goodness.

Thanks the for the suggestion and the time challenge

Nice! No Google Maps link on "First Day Finds".
Now, can we have it interfacing with our "Mates" so we can see which caches we both have on our "Planned Caches" lists?! Or maybe that's something for the "Mates" page...

Yay for a website which actually responds to user input

Thanks C@W!

zactyl wrote:Nice! No Google Maps link on "First Day Finds".
Now, can we have it interfacing with our "Mates" so we can see which caches we both have on our "Planned Caches" lists?! Or maybe that's something for the "Mates" page...

At the moment, correct. The First Day Finds are not strictly hotlists as they're not there by choice, but as a default of finding a cache on the first day it was found. The query for this statistic is horrifying (it's the biggest and most convoluted query I've ever writtem joining half a dozen tables in a very weird way) so I didn't include it as I was unsure of the performance hit. It's something that I will look at when I get more than a couple of hours to play.

Great idea on having it connected to mates. I'll have to see what I can do there. The concept of mates is indeed to have things like this. i.e. If your mate has the same cache on the planned list as you do, then it would highlight that so you can get together and go do it together. This assumes your mates are mates and you're not just stalking someone

Justcameron wrote:Yay for a website which actually responds to user input

Thanks C@W!

You're welcome.

If you (or anyone) have suggestions for enhancements to make your caching life easier / more fun / more stalkerish, please don't hesitate to ask for them.

We can't always accommodate everything, but we will always look for new and exciting things to help you enjoy the site.

Very nice feature. The only suggestion that I have would be to make the map icon a bit bigger so that it's easier for people to know what it is. It's a bit small and indecipherable on my screen, but there seems to sufficient room for a bigger one.

SamCarter wrote:Very nice feature. The only suggestion that I have would be to make the map icon a bit bigger so that it's easier for people to know what it is. It's a bit small and indecipherable on my screen, but there seems to sufficient room for a bigger one.

About 20% of the development time was finding the icon
By convention the icons at GCA are 16x16 so that's what I did for this one.
I'm happy that you posted about the size as I thought it was too small too. When I get home tonight I'll make one up that's a little larger.

How's the new sized icon?

caughtatwork wrote:

zactyl wrote:Nice! No Google Maps link on "First Day Finds".
Now, can we have it interfacing with our "Mates" so we can see which caches we both have on our "Planned Caches" lists?! Or maybe that's something for the "Mates" page...

At the moment, correct. The First Day Finds are not strictly hotlists as they're not there by choice, but as a default of finding a cache on the first day it was found. The query for this statistic is horrifying (it's the biggest and most convoluted query I've ever writtem joining half a dozen tables in a very weird way) so I didn't include it as I was unsure of the performance hit. It's something that I will look at when I get more than a couple of hours to play.

Great idea on having it connected to mates. I'll have to see what I can do there. The concept of mates is indeed to have things like this. i.e. If your mate has the same cache on the planned list as you do, then it would highlight that so you can get together and go do it together. This assumes your mates are mates and you're not just stalking someone

Okey dokey.

Go to your mates page http://geocaching.com.au/my/mates/

If any of your mates have the same cache on their planned hotlist, you will see how many they have planned that you also have.

It should say Joint Planned: n

Now, if you click on their cacher name, you will be taken to their mates information and there you should find the caches that you are planning that are on both of your lists.

I am not going to join all of your mates together on a single joint planned list as the database access to work out who is planning what is simply too large. It also means that if you have 9 mates the probability of all of them planning the same cache would approach zero and so we would waste database access for essentially no reason.

Enjoy.

Brilliant as always and more thanks for your efforts.

Now (rather than but) at the risk of biting the hand that feeds me stats and such, is there a way that we could select our "mates". For example a carload of 4 heading to Bathurst for a cache nab weekend selecting only those that none have found? So not a permanent link but selectable?

I'm sure this can be achieved via GSAK but that requires PQs (and some level of competance that eludes me) and appears fiddly, and besides you do such good work, are brilliant and assorted other grovelling. It's probably a pipe dream but.......