What's new on Geocaching Australia

[Zalgariath]

* Yes, there is something in the works that this will end up quite useful for, but it's a secret.

Should we all start buying Swaggie Building Materials?!?!

[caughtatwork]

Well ... maybe, but I do have an idea that you might ultimately end up liking (or not), depending on your desire to support the site financially. It might be a bit cliche, but hey, I'm known for being cliche.

[Papa Bear_Left]

It might be a bit cliche, but hey, I'm known for being cliche.

I've told you a million times to avoid cliches like the plague...

[caughtatwork]

http://geocaching.com.au/logs/swaggies/

In almost the same way that you can view cache logs, you can now view swaggie logs.
From the Logs tab at the top of the page, hover over it and select swaggies.

It behaves in the same manner as cache logs.
Default is last week, but you can select last 2, 3 or 4 weeks, or select all (to a maximum of 2,000 logs).
I see that at least one swaggie has been "spotted" in the last week.

[caughtatwork]

http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Geocacher_clock

The Geocacher Clock is a realtime clock where the time is displayed via a photo generated and uploaded by the members at Geocaching Australia. You can see the clock in action here http://geocaching.com.au/clock/ or by hovering over the Cachers tab and select Clock to see in in use as well.

You upload photos to the Geocacher Clock via your My pages. http://geocaching.com.au/my/clock or by hovering over the My tab and selecting clock.

The concept is similar (well almost completely ripped off) to the human clock experiment which can be seen in action here http://www.humanclock.com/clock.php

Initially time periods which do not have any geocacher picture will show the Geocaching Australia logo with the time stamped in the bottom left corner.

Take a photograph of you along with a time piece clearly showing the time. You are encouraged to be very lateral in your thinking in how you want to present the time. The only requirement is that you or your GPS is clearly shown in the picture and that the time is also clearly shown. After all, it is the picture of the time that will tell people what the time is. Maybe you could take a picture of yourself in front of the town hall clock, the clock in your bedroom, you could lay down on the beach and hold your arms up to the right time or scrawl the time in the sand. Be creative. Check the human clock site for ideas, but remember, you or your GPS needs to be in the picture.

Each 1 minute period is available for use, so over a 24 hour period this will require 1,440 pictures. Once a picture has been uploaded, that time period is no longer available. As such, we ask that for "popular" times, you please keep to one or two pictures. That way lots of people get the opportunity to get their face out in prime time.

You can also log a locationless cache called The Geocacher Clock
http://geocaching.com.au/cache/ga2610

[caughtatwork]

To make GCA a little more world friendly, we've enhanced the log and hide a cache page to default the date to GMT +/- your timezone offset that you have set in your forum profile.

This is not a perfect solution with so many different DST changes around the world, but for the most part you should find that if you are in a timezone which is not Australia/Melbourne, then the default date on your log and when you hide a cache should be your local timezone.

If you notice some weirdness, please let us know.

[mtrax]

err. weirdness..
Fatal error: Call to undefined function gca_gmt_user_timezone() in /var/www/site/gca/docroot/my/log/index.php on line 39

[caughtatwork]

Forgot to commit that part of the code.
Sorry about that.

[caughtatwork]

Are you tired of dates being displayed in a fashion that you are unfamiliar with?
d/m/y
m/d/y
dd-mmm-yy
Well, here at Geocaching Australia you can now set your own date format* and enjoy dates as you would like them to be.

You can set your date format via your my settings page:
http://geocaching.com.au/my/settings

Use this handy dandy list to define your date format:
http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Date_display_format

We hope that by becoming more international and not restricting cachers to view the dates in the format most convenient to the developers, you will be able to enjoy the site even more.

If you notice weirdness, please let us know.

*Disclaimer: Files which are generated on an hourly or daily basis will still display dates in dd-mmm-yy format. As they are generated and stored to minimise database and CPU usage, they are stored with a default format set. These include, but are not restricted to graphs and some leaderboard components.

[caughtatwork]

As part of the next step towards Geocaching Australia being utilised be people around the world, we have made a change to help you along.

The webserver for Geocaching Australia is in Melbourne so the default date and time is set to AEST (moving 1 hour for DST*). So if you're in a timezone that would be "yesterday" or "tomorrow" from the webserver point of view, we set certain fields to the webserver date regardless of where you are.

Certain dates being the default log date on swaggies and caches and the default hidden date for new caches, etc.

We now utilise the timezone setting in your forum profile to determine a best estimate of which timezone you are in and we will set the date accordingly.

e.g. If it's 1:00am AEST but you are in Western Australia where it's still "yesterday" according to the server, by setting your timezone to GMT + 8 , the default date on new logs, etc should show your local date rather than you having to change it.

Unfortunately we cannot detect DST offsets around the world, so you'll need to do that manually when Eastern Australia enters DST or your own timezone enters DST.

You can set your timezone via your my settings page or via the forums. They are the same database field, so you can use either.
http://geocaching.com.au/my/settings

We hope that by becoming more international and not restricting your experience to our default timezone of AEST you will be able to enjoy the site even more.

If you notice weirdness, please let us know.

*DST = Daylight Savings Time

[caughtatwork]

Up until now, Geocaching Australia have accepted date inputs as the standard Australian format of d/m/y. With Geocaching Australia being used by more and more folks not based in Australia we have changed the way that you enter dates so you're not tied to the Australian way of life.

Each date input area now has a dropdown for day, month (spelled out) and year (2000 through to current year + 1).

We appreciate that this may be a challenge for non English speakers and we're looking at a method for covering this.

If you enter a date that is not valid, rather than spit an error back at you, the wonderfulness that is MySQL will attempt to convert it into a valid date.

e.g. 30-February-2010 will become 2-March-2010. 31-September-2010 would become 1-October-2010. etc.

So if you get the date right, there is no problem. If you purposely choose an invalid date, we'll do our best to try and convert it to something valid, but may not be 100% accurate.

We hope this makes our international cachers a little more comfortable with using Geocaching Australia.

[PesceVerde]

UTC+10, that's me. None of that DST nonsense.
Excellent.

[Trigg-A-Nomics]

Jolly well done!

[caughtatwork]

With the recent activity for new technology emerging that can be used in the geocaching space, Geocaching Australia has launched a new cache type to bring these emerging technologies into your geocaching realm.

http://wiki.geocaching.com.au/wiki/Beacon_Cache

Some of this technology is available in Australia and is quite expensive, while some of the technology has only recently been launched into the market and it not yet available in Australia.

At Geocaching Australia we want you to enjoy geocaching at every technology level possible, so we aim to bring new caches to the Geocaching Australia website as new opportunities emerge.

This new cache type will appear in GSAK as "other" and if you send it directly to your Garmin device it should show as "other" being a closed treasure chest.

If you do not have the necessary GPS to access the new technologies you can filter them out in your MyQuery and you can also add them into your MyAlerts so you can be the first to find one of these brand new caches types that are only available at Geocaching Australia.

Remember, Geocaching Australia does not restrict the use of pixels, we bought many of them with the new server, so if you would like to discuss this new cache type further, please do not hesitate to fire up a new thread. Don't forget you can also ask your friendly developers to consider all and any requests and ideas that you have for new ideas and concepts at Geocaching Australia. We are always ready and willing to help you enjoy the fun of geocaching in ways you may never have experienced before.

[Coffee and Cache]

With the recent activity for new technology emerging that can be used in the geocaching space, Geocaching Australia has launched a new cache type to bring these emerging technologies into your geocaching realm.

Is this going to be a surprise, or I have missed some critical piece of information?