If you have suggestions, post them over on the Geek-Maps at UserVoice.

http://treutech.uservoice.com/pages/geek_maps

I went to a local PHP Meetup Tuesday night and a Web Design Meetup Monday night.  Tonight I had to work on a freelance project I hadn’t worked on because I was working on this site.  I’ve also been working on a new design for the site.  One that will make better use of the space.  Updates in the next few days.

One of my next goals for the submission page is to have just one text box for the address.  I was a bit ethnocentric in my design only allowing for cities and states.  I’ll also have to merge the address data for the previous entries.  One problem I see arising is querying.  I have drop-down boxes with country codes and state codes ready to be added.  You could select a country or state and get back specific results, however if someone enters the country without using the code then there is a problem.  That’s something to look at down the road.

One of my other front burner features is a login and/or use of cookies.  The Wiki model of tracking would work for editing reviews and descriptions.  But for rating landmarks, you need a concrete identifier beyond just an IP address.  That’s where a login would come in.  So I’ve been thinking through how to make that work.

I did some research and learned of the asynchronous flag for the XMLHTTPRequest.open method.  False tells the rest of the code to not wait on it to run.  True tells the code that it is the center of the universe and everything must wait on it.  Now if the page you are requesting is down then this could cause problems.  But since I only need my script to wait an extra couple milliseconds I should be ok.  In addition, the page I’m requesting is on my server so if it fails to return a result then I have bigger issues than just a script taking too long.

It was also during this that I found out that once you navigated through the results the URL for the A letter pin came out as ʊ instead A.  So I browsed the code and determined when I reset the counting variable I set it as a string instead of a number.  I took out the two apostrophes and everything works fine now.

Well, I’m leaving the office and going to take a long ride on Trinity Trails.  I’ve been sitting down for extended periods of time the last couple of days and my body is craving exercise.

Speaking of Buzz Out Loud.  I turned into a complete giddy fanboy after hearing my email read on the podcast this morning.  I’ve listened to the show for about a year now and just enjoy their friendly and sometimes argumentative banter.  And to have them take time during the show to mention this site and give constructive feedback and ideas was just fun.

• When you rate a landmark, the page will refresh using an AJAX call, so you don’t have to wait on the entire page to load again.
• I implemented paging. On page load, only the top 5 ranked landmarks will appear. By only including 5 results at a time, if you click on a landmark you won’t have to scroll back to the top of the page to see what you clicked on.
• The ranking mechanism also uses an AJAX call so you can’t game the system using the query strings by hitting refresh 666 times.

Things that need to be done or I would like to add:

• Use of cookies and/or a login so a user won’t rate a landmark 50 times.
• The ability to query landmarks based on states and countries.
• Tagging would make querying results more interesting.
• Option to enter a URL for the landmark.
• (MAYBE) The ability to enter a short write up about the significance about the landmark.
• A way to enter latitude & longitude in case Google can’t find a landmark based on the information provided by the user.
• (MAYBE) Figure out how to make StreetView work. Not that it’s that critical to this site but I just want to play with it.
• I would like to add in directions so you could create a tour map based on the landmarks you choose.

One thought I had would be to highlight a landmark and go a little more in-depth than what might be in the brief description. I’ve also noticed today that my stats on Wordpress.com are not working. They are working great on my personal blog but I’ve got bupkus over the last two days. Oh well. Well, the clock just struck midnight. I’ve only gotten about about 4 hours sleep in the last two days, and I’ve got my day job tomorrow.

So what’s the point. Geek-maps.com is a place to locate tech or geek slanted historical landmarks for your next trip. Geek-maps.com is where the community can contribute noteworthy landmarks. The HP Garage, Thomas Edison’s lab, and other places that are significant to history or just to geek culture.

And yes it is another web 2.0 application. And yes it is not very good. But hey, I threw it together in less than 12 hours. I’ll be adding additional features and I would love to hear your feedback.

So what are you waiting for, check out the landmarks and rate them or submit new landmarks.