Category: Site Stuff

Microsoft just released their preview version of Bing Maps V8. I used V7 to show an aerial view of the properties in my TetonValleyMap so I decided to implement their new version today. It’s now live.

What I discovered is that once you’re viewing the aerial view you can select a street view that is similar to Google Maps, but with amazing imagery. Below is a screen capture of the Coulter Building in downtown Driggs. Judge the quality for yourself…

Here’s Steph’s work:

My Teton Valley Map is up to version 2.0.

I made some amazing improvements to TetonValleyMap today, in between our run down to the Super Walmart in Rexburg and a stop at Commercial Tire for a service. Supplies for my trip next Friday were bought, my truck had her alignment and charging system tuned, and I still had time for some cool code before and after.

You can now select one or more cities, type in a partial address, and then perform a search. For example: select Driggs and Victor and then specify a numeric street number (ex: 11) or a partial street name (ex: mou) in the Search area, and submit.

If you would like to try it out, click here.

The Teton Valley Map continues to progress towards ultimate completion. I’ve implemented Zip Code overlays that can be toggled on and off with a right-click, and much more.

Ok, here’s that program that’s taken up a lot of my time lately. If you would like to run it, click here. The little question mark slide bar on the left, explains it…

I’m on the verge of releasing my new map app. It’s focused on my neck of the woods and contains over 10,000 addresses across five cities in Teton Valley, Idaho. Those would be Alta (which is actually in Wyoming, but our close neighbor), Driggs, Felt, Tetonia and Victor.

You can toggle individual cities on and off the map and you will be able to isolate addresses by street. Here’s an image of the prototype zoomed all the way out:

Here’s the app at base mode:

Here’s the view at two zoom clicks out:

My poor brain is swirling around in a sea of Google eccentricities. The new map program is focused on the area I live in, Teton Valley Idaho, and I recently came across an amazing dataset of 10,000 lat/lng sets that represent every address in our valley.

I have no idea how the data reached the internet, especially since surrounding areas have none, but I suspect it had to do with an earlier address conversion that occurred here. In any event, I have it.

The data initial consists of city: (Driggs, Victor, Tetonia, Felt and Alta) and the Longitude and Latitude for each address. This was enough for me to go banging the lat/lng’s up against the Google reverse goecoder, to obtain additional information like street address and bounds.

Very quickly I ran up against Googles rate limits. They don’t mind if you write an app that sends a location to their API and get an address back within a web app, but when you start sending thousands of them at a time, they have a problem. Actually, they like apps that maintain their addresses, it saves them overhead, as long as you implement the data on their Google maps. You just have to play their complicated game, to get it.

I’ve created a MySql database on my server that is gathering up all of the geolocation data for the Teton Valley as I write this. I had to go through an amazing number of poorly documented hoops from Google including signing up for their pay as you go plan ($.50 per thousand hits).

All of that is done and I have an amazing database of mapable addresses for Teton Valley at my disposal and a very cool map program is in the wings…

Update (10/14/17): All of this is now gone…

I’m working on an amazing new map project. Stay tuned, and excuse me while I code…

I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with presenting information about places in the United States to the general public via my apps. I suppose it’s because I enjoy the experience of discovery and I want to share it. I also find great satisfaction from mastering the technique of extracting valuable information from publicly available API’s and presenting it to you, for your consumption however you wish.

My latest app, DahMap, is a reverse geocoder that provides information about any place that interests you. Type in a place and go. I’m also currently working on a fun little app that and gives you the official websites of every city and county in the U.S.

It’s currently functional within DahMap. Each place you select, or map position you click on, contains a county link, which opens the new app. It’s a whole lot of fun and you can discover city and county home pages you never knew existed.

Here are the links to the examples below: Los Angeles, and the related cities and California counties, are here.

I launched a new website today. I swore I was going to scale back this addiction but my ISP offers new domain names for $12 bucks and then a year later they want $16 bucks to renew it. Oh well, my ability to snag short names still remains suburb. Here we are a couple of decades into the internet revolution and I can still find them.

Introducing: DahMap! Type in a search, or drag and click anywhere in the world.

You know, when you want to explore, you go to dah map. It’s a Leaflet map mashed up with the MapZen geocoder (cool huh…). It’s still under development but you can certainly try it out if you like (right…).

Here’s the Santa Cruz Boardwalk as an example:

And here’s my bus at our base:

I’ve created a new app called ZypDown. It uses a lot of the cool code I wrote for Scwelch that you can’t use because you’re not a member, so here you go…

Enter a zip code or a place and see all of the places around there that you didn’t know existed, and can now explore. You can also just scroll the map around the U.S. and click anywhere to get a zip code. Enjoy!

Here’s the help screen I just whipped up for the folks in the RadioReference forum who have been wondering about my new app Scwelch, which you can’t access unless you pay RR for the privilege. That’s alright faithful followers, I know most of you don’t use my code, much less check it out, so it’s no big deal. You are forgiven, Happy New Year!

Meanwhile, we’re just trying to stay warm. It was -22° when I picked up my Tetonia client this morning. The heaters are humming now, Piper’s on Steph’s bed, Steph’s watching Netflix in the family room, and I’m getting ready to welcome the new mark here in my office. Don’t know what will go down, bongos and Alexa may be involved…

My latest app Frehq uses a sophisticated JQuery ajax technique called promises which is a deferred object that can handle multiple callbacks asynchronously and relay the success or failure state of each function back to the app as it happens. When you click Submit the program sends out a request to each RSS feed you have selected, simultaneously. As each feed comes back I turn the count indicator red and it’s fascinating to see the sequence they arrive, in real time.

I’ve also implemented a timeout value which stops each process if it exceeds x number of seconds. The default is five seconds, but you can adjust that value with the new slider at the bottom. If any selection exceeds the timer the control turns yellow, the whole thing stops, and you can de-select the slow retrieving feed or bump the timeout value up higher. This gives you control over how much time you’re willing to invest in receiving the content, and the flexibility I’m able to create just blows my old programmers mind!

New five letter domain names suggestive of a real word are a rarity in the internet world as 2015 comes to an end, and my recent acquisition of frehq.com has stirred up a ton of interest from the site hustlers of the world. I’m getting email, and phone calls directly to my cell, from shysters that want to create a website for me at that domain. I suspect they have an algorithm that searches for new short domain names.

This begs the question, why would I buy a domain name without having the html5, css3, jquery and php chops to build a functional site myself and be capable of implementing it on the Bluehost servers that present my work to the world from Utah?

I suppose there are idiots out there that grab domain names and hope the world comes knocking on their door, and from what I see, the world will come knocking, but it would be really stupid, to answer…