MnGCA

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

The maps are back up and running and hosted on my own personal server. It's a bit slower but it will work just fine.

Sorry for the inconveinience.
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Sad state of affairs.

fidian · Geocacher Joined: 23 Nov 2005 Posts: 126

How about making the map interactive, using Google Maps API?

If you like, I have a live demo that shows the caches that geocaching.com knows about from the laker map text file that's available. Since you already run PHP, it could also run from this server. It uses a cache file, which you can generate when the lakers are updated instead of when people want to view the map...

Anyway, take a look at it and let me know if you like it. It is sometimes a bit slow to load because it looks up the information for the caches live. If anything changed from the last time the coordinates were fetched, things will be updated appropriately. It would be a bit better if that data was stored when the laker was placed into a cache, just like how the text file gets updated.

towlebooth · Posted: Wed Nov 23, 2005 1:47 pm Post subject:

This would be an improvement. Any interest in the open Webmaster position?

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

Your PHP code seems to require a Google API key which only permits 100 queries a day. The Lakermap sees more traffic than that here.

Is there a way to do it w/o the Google API?

[edit] I assume that your cached data means that it would only update when someone drops/retrieves a laker. I'm dumb today. Too much food on the brain.
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Sad state of affairs.

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

Now that I've been reading your post and thinking about it some more over my favorite caffeinated beverage, it probably wouldn't be possible to do the Laker coord lookups when the lakers are dropped...

The webserver the site is hosted on won't run the scripts used to retrieve the data (and thus why I host the maps on my own site).

I'm not about to go this route and I'll instead wait for someone else to take over the webmaster position and maybe they can figure it out.

Thanks for the suggestion.
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Sad state of affairs.

fidian · Geocacher Joined: 23 Nov 2005 Posts: 126

The Google Maps API says "If you expect to get more than 50,000 page views per day, you must contact us to get permission to use the API. During this "pilot" period, Google Maps may not be able to accommodate very large web sites." 50,000 page views a day should accomodate this site.

For the lookup, can you use PHP's fopen() to retrieve a URL? If you can use this code, you can use the lookup in a PHP page. That's basically what I use. I wrote a function that grabs a GPX file from geocaching.com using basically what you see here, but with a couple more lines.

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

I can't get a GPX from geocaching.com on the MnGCA webserver as we don't have a Premium account for the MnGCA. I'm not going to use my own account for that either.
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Sad state of affairs.

fidian · Geocacher Joined: 23 Nov 2005 Posts: 126

It can always be parsed out of the cache's page as long as it is not a member's-only cache. Or retrieved from a LOC file. In fact, I just changed mine to get a LOC file because it is smaller. Basically, I can get it however you like, but those GPX and LOC files are just a bit easier to parse.

fidian · Geocacher Joined: 23 Nov 2005 Posts: 126

This is not intended as a bump. Instead, I would like to tell people that the map was not working for a while, but now it is working again. It now logs in as me properly in order to grab the correct coordinates (not via LOC/GPX but parses it out of the cache page). This means that the laker map should now always be updated. Yeay!

Oh, and these changes could make it work pretty well on the MnGCA site - only caches that are "Members Only" wouldn't get coordinates without a subscription account. That shouln't happen too often.

Anyway, just letting people know that the map is now being updated properly: http://rumkin.com/tools/gps/lakermap.php
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Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

The Lakers map is being updated again after a system upgrade and domain change on my end.

Sorry for the delay Smile

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Sad state of affairs.

merkman · Past MnGCA Board Joined: 03 Jun 2006 Posts: 2032

I have scripting/coding skills to volunteer for the lakers game if anyone is interested.

merkman

(I hope I don't regret this)