I was working on Unthirsty last night when I came across an example of using a particular geocoding plugin. The addresses they were using were in the UK, and I was puzzled because last I checked the UK wasn’t available in any free geocoding API that I could find. So I tried out geocoding a pub in London and what do you know? Yahoo! came up with an accurate result with precision down to the address. So I tried a few more, and they all worked. This is great news, because it allows us to catalog happy hours in the motherland of pubs. I thought I’d share because apparently this has been around for a while and I didn’t even know about it. Anyone looking around for a free geocoding service for the UK, check out the Yahoo! Geocoding API. Also, if your Rails app needs geocoding support, check out Graticule, and see my snippet to make Graticule failover to multiple geocoding services.
Archive for May, 2007
Although it hasn’t been accepted into the directory listing yet, the Unthirsty Facebook App is now live, and you can add it to your Facebook profile. The application will show you the closest happy hours to the location you enter as your current location in your profile, and then will place the 5 closest in your profile homepage. You can also set the default location for Unthirsty to look for happy hours, if you don’t want to use your current location.
This is revision one and may have some bugs, so if you find any leave me a comment. I’ll be working on improving in the next few weeks for incorporation into Unthirsty: Level 2. One bug you may want to know about is that if your current location in your profile isn’t set it will break the app, so if it doesn’t work for you, make sure your information is filled out.
Awesome news came out of Facebook this week that they opened up their system to allow developers to create custom applications that can live in Facebook profiles. I checked it out and started developing my own application, but it wasn’t without a lot of hiccups on the way. My settings kept getting reset, my application kept disappearing, and the API kept giving random errors. Right now I can’t even work on it because the system lost my application and I can’t add it back in. Fortunately most of the work is done on the application living on my server, so I haven’t lost much work.
I am still excited to finish this application and see if Facebook applications take off and become a successful thing, and I’m willing to let them work out a few kinks before I can get my application up and running. I’m just really glad to not be a Facebook engineer right now.
If you have a Facebook account, be on the lookout for some cool apps, and also coming in the next few days there will be an Unthirsty Happy Hour Facebook app available that will show happy hours nearest to your location set in your profile.
I was put in charge of going through an entire site to validate every HTML page, and the first thing I thought of was “how do I automate this?”. I noticed they had a Google sitemap, which makes it easier for Google to find and index content on a web site. Immediately I realized I could write a script to parse the sitemap file and go out and validate each page at the W3C Validator. As usual, someone has already thought about it and made a pretty web interface for it. Check out the Google Sitemap HTML Validator Tool that will open your Google sitemap and validate each page it finds and report the errors back to you. I love the Internet!
- Memcache rules, and it’s easy to use with Cache-Fu
- Geeks aren’t socially retarded
- Free coffee goes really fast
- Always practice your presentations
- Twitter only uses one MySQL database and a slave
- ~90% of Rails developers have an Apple laptop
- There are people out there that spend more time on their laptop than I do
- Developers are more generous than I thought
- Normalized Data == Good (most of the time)
- Helpers in your views is where it’s at