New Group Layout & Another Small Glitch
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I like the new layout of the Groups - hopefully it will help attract more people. Now, the glitch. On the map page where it "automatically" shows my location. For me, Mount Lemmon is WAY cross town. If I change the location to Oro Valley, and the radius to 90 miles, there is apparently no way to save that information. Every time I come back to the site, it says my location in Mount Lemmon and shows the jams within 70 miles. I don't understand how it suddenly defaults to the Mount Lemmon stuff when it used to be correct with Oro Valley. Is something with the map people, or within your parameters? Submitted by Banjo_Brad on Wed, 2007/09/05 - 5:54pm
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United States
March 23, 2006
Brad, Are you talking about the map on the front page of folkjam.org, or the map within the groups?
United States
January 3, 2007
Banjo Brad
www.PricklyPearMusic.net
I'm talking about the map on the home page of folkjam. When it comes up, instead of the default location on the righthand side of the screen saying Oro Valley, Arizona, it says Mount Lemmon, Arizona. If I change the location and the mileage parameters, they are fine until I leave the site. OK, I just went there, changed to Oro Valley, went to my homepage and returned to folkjam. This time, it still said "Tucson"& 90 miles, but then it has a button to "return to home location." That replaced the Mount Lemmmon and 70 mile parameters to the map.
This map should show my city (I can do with Tucson), not a location that I never put in there. I just don't understand why it suddenly changed my defaults there.
The map within the groups thing is fine, except that it apparently thinks that our group location is situated somewhere out in the middle of the Catalina Mountains, instead of in the actual town of Oro Valley. Like Erich says, that map marker (the Saguaro cactus symbol) should be tied to the Group's jam address. It appears that this marker is tied to the location on the first page, now that I do a little investigation. My marker used to be closer to Oro Valley, at least, now it has moved East quite a bit.
United States
March 23, 2006
Brad,
I was just exploring the site as your user and see exactly what you are talking about, and indeed saw the flip flop between Tuscon and Mount Lemmon. The problem appears to be outside of our control - we rely on Google to turn cities into latitude/longitude for us. We've seen them adjust their data in the past, and it appears to have happened again.
Take a look here:
http://maps.google.com/?q=%2C+Oro+Valley%2C+AZ%2C+85737%2C+us
and it shows the same incorrect result as folkjam, putting your location in the center of what I'm sure is a lovely park, but not your home.
MapQuest has a similar error, making me wonder if perhaps the source data from the US GIS is wrong.
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?searchtype=address&country=US&addre...
And Yahoo gets it right
http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?addr=&csz=Oro+Valley%2C+AZ&country=us
You are broadly still being shown the right area, which is good, but I too would want 'my location' to be where I said I was. In practical terms, Google offers us this service and data for free and I continue to appreciate that. I am mystified by the results at times, and this is one of them.
I found this form [1] and will submit an error report to Google on the Oro Valley data tonight. We do also cache the results that come in from Google, so once/if they make a change that change will not be reflected in your profile until you edit it and save it.
Scott
[1] http://local.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=MapsAPI&subm...
United States
March 23, 2006
Brad,
A phenomenon we have also seen is different data between the Google maps API and maps.google.com.
I removed the zip code from your profile, and now you are consistently placed in Tucson (still not what I want...). Removing the zip from the maps.google.com query always lands you in the center of the Oro Valley.
Shawn or I need to look into this further when we dig into this in our dev environment.
Scott
United States
January 3, 2007
Thanks, Scott.
I know there are always nits to be picked with software, having done my share of writing and debugging the stuff. And when you rely on outside sources, things progress by factor increments.
Appreciate your hard work!
Banjo Brad
www.PricklyPearMusic.net
United States
March 23, 2006
I didn't realize you too had a computing background.
Just keep on picking the nits. We certainly don't have the bandwidth to handle each and every one, but it is never a bad thing to have more on the plate than can possibly be done.
And you are welcome. Thanks for your early and frequent use of the site.
I'm glad you think the new groups layout is better. I don't know what I was thinking... :)
United States
November 22, 2006
I don't think that this is what Brad is talking about but I'll add it here anyway.
I'd kind of like to be able to tie the location of the group icon to an address. I think it now puts it in the centroid of the city or zip code. To me that seems confusing.
Erich
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http://vrteach.freepgs.com/banjo/
United States
March 23, 2006
Brad and Erich,
I've seen enough cases where people were confused by the placement of the group map pin in the middle of a city (which seems random to most people) to agree. My intent on keeping the group resolution down to a city level was to simplify things, as not all groups have an address but most are related to a city.
We have a few post-upgrade bugs to work through. I'll expose the ability to enter a full street address for a group shortly after those bugs are done, which could be after Winfield.
Scott