More Google Maps Mashupy Goodness...

Jules said:

As promised a few days ago... I present: "Bikely"

bikely.combikely.comOpen ↗

First, a quick spiel from the homepage:

"Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle
routes.

It can be quite tricky traversing a car dominated city such as Melbourne
on a bike, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a
new destination.

But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely
makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way.
"

A few notes;
This is a really early release. It may work. It may not work at all (I
think it's broken in Opera ATM + I don't have any Macs to test on). It
may do strange things that you don't expect. In IE6 and Firefox 1.5 it
seems to work!

Please let me know of any broken things you find. In this thread will
do for now - I'll setup a feedback/bugs email address soon.

The usefulness of this idea is of course entirely dependent on how many
bike routes we get into the database over time. If this attracts a
sufficient following and we build a comprehensive network of bike paths,
then I'll be glad to throw more development time into the project and
add the necessary searching facilities and whatever other web2.0ey stuff
that makes people feel warm and fuzzy.

Anyway.. for now, enjoy and let me know what your first impressions are.

Cheers,
Jules

Good work Jules. Easy to use, although I'm 2/3 of the way through my commute, and it's starting to get a little slow. I'm at about 70 points.
Any chance of a elevation graph like the GMap Pedometer site?

Jules said:

As promised a few days ago... I present: "Bikely"

http://www.bikely.com/

First, a quick spiel from the homepage:

"Put very simply, Bikely helps cyclists share knowledge of good bicycle
routes.

It can be quite tricky traversing a car dominated city such as Melbourne
on a bike, particularly when you need to travel an unknown route to a
new destination.

But the chances are, someone has cycled that way before you. Bikely
makes it easy for him or her to show you the best way.
"

A few notes;
This is a really early release. It may work. It may not work at all (I
think it's broken in Opera ATM + I don't have any Macs to test on). It
may do strange things that you don't expect. In IE6 and Firefox 1.5 it
seems to work!

Hmmmm I have some Macs at work. Remind me and I will test it for you.
THey have Safari and Firefox on em.

Quoted message said:

Awesome Jules

I've been thinking about doing a text based site like this for a while.
When Google released their maps for Aus on Friday I started work on
something like this, but didn't get a lot of time to throw at it.
You've done a great job, it's probably best if I put my time into
adding routes to yours than building another one 🙂

I found the process of adding a map and saving it required a little
guess work (I lost one map in the proces). Perhaps down the left hand
side you could put some really simple instructions. I also missed the
"Name this route" and Save button the first time around.

Looks great though.

What platform have you built it on ? ( I'm guessing Rails).

I have a couple of ideas for features I was going to add, email me if
you'd like to hear them.

Love your work

Damian (1 route added)

Jules said:

Anyway.. for now, enjoy and let me know what your first impressions are.

Cheers,
Jules

Nice enough, but after trying several times to 'join' I kept getting a
username and password don't match, even with cookies. Makes it a rather
worthless page.

Quoted message said:

JulesGood work Jules. Easy to use, although I'm 2/3 of the way

through my

Quoted message said:

commute, and it's starting to get a little slow. I'm at about 70
points.

Yeah it does get slow unfortunately. Not sure if there's much I can do
about that, as it relies mostly on Googles API for the grunt work.

Are you using firefox? I've found that in Firefox the red line
(generated by Google's API) is actually a PNG refreshed on every change
(!!) I was slightly horrified to discover that this is how they
implemented it. In IE it uses the MS VML stuff to generate vectors on
the fly, which is obviously much much faster.

So, grudgingly, I use IE to author paths ;-(

Quoted message said:

Any chance of a elevation graph like the GMap Pedometer site?

In time ;-) I've found the data source, so it can certainly be done
reasonably easily.

Damian said:

I've been thinking about doing a text based site like this for a while.
When Google released their maps for Aus on Friday I started work on
something like this, but didn't get a lot of time to throw at it.
You've done a great job, it's probably best if I put my time into
adding routes to yours than building another one 🙂

Heh.. I spent about 4 days flat out on it. Need a little break from it
now ;-)

Quoted message said:

I found the process of adding a map and saving it required a little
guess work (I lost one map in the proces). Perhaps down the left hand
side you could put some really simple instructions. I also missed the
"Name this route" and Save button the first time around.

Yeah... Definitely needs refinements. There are instructions down the
LHS.. too brief you reckon?

Quoted message said:

What platform have you built it on ? ( I'm guessing Rails).

PHP actually.. on a custom framework I've used for a few projects.

Quoted message said:

I have a couple of ideas for features I was going to add, email me if
you'd like to hear them.

Will do.

Cheers,
Jules

Quoted message said:

Nice enough, but after trying several times to 'join' I kept getting a
username and password don't match, even with cookies. Makes it a rather
worthless page.

Hmmm this is a bit odd. Let's try to sort it out.

Did you successfully register an account, but couldn't log in? Or did
the registration process fail you?

What username did you (try to) register?

Cheers,
Jules

Jules said:

Are you using firefox? I've found that in Firefox the red line
(generated by Google's API) is actually a PNG refreshed on every change
(!!) I was slightly horrified to discover that this is how they
implemented it. In IE it uses the MS VML stuff to generate vectors on
the fly, which is obviously much much faster.

I don't know if you've read the history / updates page on the gmap
pedometer site, but he added an optimisation for longer routes that
only renders the points in the current view. Might be worth a look
into.

I used FF for the route I added, it worked fine for me.

Damian

Jules said:

As promised a few days ago... I present: "Bikely"

http://www.bikely.com/

Not bad. Any chance you could modify it so it doesn't need cookies? eg:
a session number in the URL if cookies are disabled. (I habitually click
"deny" whenever I'm asked to allow cookies. I also have Flash disabled
as a matter of course, but that's beside the point. :-)

Quoted message said:

This is a really early release. It may work. It may not work at all (I
think it's broken in Opera ATM + I don't have any Macs to test on). It

I'll do some testing in Safari shortly.

--
My Usenet From: address now expires after two weeks. If you email me, and
the mail bounces, try changing the bit before the "@ to usenet".

Jules said:

Yeah... Definitely needs refinements. There are instructions down the
LHS.. too brief you reckon?

Yes, too brief. You tend to look at the left and the map, and not notice the title and save button at the top. For a first time user, a detailed click by click explanation would be good. The instructions down the left are good for reminding you what to do.

When finished enter "Name this route" and "Save".

Good work. I've added my commute.

Stuart Lamble said:

Jules said:

I don't have any Macs to test on.

I'll do some testing in Safari shortly.

It seems to work ok in Safari, just one small point: after logging in,
it seems to go to a completely blank screen. (this may or may not be
because I'm going through a Privoxy proxy, rather than an ordinary
everyday standard Squid proxy, though.) Going back to the main page and
then working from there works around the problem.

--
My Usenet From: address now expires after two weeks. If you email me, and
the mail bounces, try changing the bit before the "@ to usenet".

rockin Jules!!! Ler ya werk 😄

Works fine in OSX10.4 Safari for me (and Firefox too)

PS can you contact me ? may have some paying work for you with this stuff?

f dutch at gmail.com

Jules said:

Anyway.. for now, enjoy and let me know what your first impressions are.

Cheers,
Jules

Kick-ACE!!!

Quoted message said:

It seems to work ok in Safari, just one small point: after logging in,
it seems to go to a completely blank screen. (this may or may not be
because I'm going through a Privoxy proxy, rather than an ordinary
everyday standard Squid proxy, though.) Going back to the main page and
then working from there works around the problem.

Any way you could try it without the proxy? I suspect you might be
right ;-) I'm pretty sure my 301's are compliant...

Re: cookies - I don't put session ids in URLs. Too ugly, and [censored] from
a security standpoint. Whose afraid of a little cookie, anyway ;-) It
expires at the end of the browser session.

Jules said:

Re: cookies - I don't put session ids in URLs. Too ugly, and [censored] from
a security standpoint. Whose afraid of a little cookie, anyway ;-) It
expires at the end of the browser session.

Don't forget you are posting to a group full of tinfoil hat wearing
emacs users 😉

(ducks, rides away)

Damian said:

Jules said:

Re: cookies - I don't put session ids in URLs. Too ugly, and [censored] from
a security standpoint. Whose afraid of a little cookie, anyway ;-) It
expires at the end of the browser session.

Don't forget you are posting to a group full of tinfoil hat wearing
emacs users 😉

I resent that remark! I use vi, thank you very much!

:-)

--
My Usenet From: address now expires after two weeks. If you email me, and
the mail bounces, try changing the bit before the "@ to usenet".

Jules said:

Anyway.. for now, enjoy and let me know what your first impressions are.

Nice one Jules. I tried to add a route but there was a script error
half-way through which seemed to make the whole route disappear. I'm
using IE 6.

I'll give it another go when I get a chance. Love the idea.

Cheers,

--
Bean

Remove "yourfinger" before replying

Jules said:

Quoted message said:

It seems to work ok in Safari, just one small point: after logging in,
it seems to go to a completely blank screen. (this may or may not be
because I'm going through a Privoxy proxy, rather than an ordinary
everyday standard Squid proxy, though.) Going back to the main page and
then working from there works around the problem.

Any way you could try it without the proxy? I suspect you might be
right ;-) I'm pretty sure my 301's are compliant...

I can't remove proxies completely, but going through a straight Squid
proxy gave me the exact same result: blank page. I've tried two
different proxies, with no change in the result.

Actually ... a quick test with Firefox on Windows (*spit*) ... guess
what? Same result again. Blank screen at http://www.bikely.com/login ...
it's going through the same proxy as my Mac.

Quoted message said:

Re: cookies - I don't put session ids in URLs. Too ugly, and [censored] from
a security standpoint.

Bollocks. If somebody's sniffing the network, they'll see the cookie
information. If they're not sniffing the network, they're rather
unlikely to be able to track the session ID from the URL. Cookies are no
more, and no less, secure than putting that stuff in the URL. As for the
ugly - meh, care factor zero from my point of view. 🙂

Quoted message said:

Whose afraid of a little cookie, anyway ;-) It
expires at the end of the browser session.

Maybe so; the point I'm making is that I reflexively deny cookies to any
website that asks, unless there is a very good reason for doing
otherwise. Call me paranoid if you must, but that's the way I tend to
use my web browser. Graceful degradation is how it should work; if
you're relying upon the client to give you complete and accurate
information, you're heading for a security problem down the road.
*Anything* and *everything* that comes from the client should be
considered suspect until otherwise verified.

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My Usenet From: address now expires after two weeks. If you email me, and
the mail bounces, try changing the bit before the "@ to usenet".

Quoted message said:

Bollocks. If somebody's sniffing the network, they'll see the cookie
information. If they're not sniffing the network, they're rather
unlikely to be able to track the session ID from the URL. Cookies are no
more, and no less, secure than putting that stuff in the URL. As for the
ugly - meh, care factor zero from my point of view. 🙂

With all due respect: "Bollocks". This isn't about someone sniffing a
network. Let's imagine you post a 3rd party URL on a forum that uses
session IDs in the URL. Someone clicks on the URL, and straight away
your session ID has been leaked in the referrer log.

Or you want to share a Bikely link with someone (or, say, aus.bicycle),
so you copy+paste the URL, including your session ID, which is now public.

Elementary stuff, and easily exploited.

Quoted message said:

Maybe so; the point I'm making is that I reflexively deny cookies to any
website that asks, unless there is a very good reason for doing
otherwise. Call me paranoid if you must, but that's the way I tend to
use my web browser. Graceful degradation is how it should work; if
you're relying upon the client to give you complete and accurate
information, you're heading for a security problem down the road.
*Anything* and *everything* that comes from the client should be
considered suspect until otherwise verified.

You _are_ paranoid!

And I have no doubt that many sites fail to work for you, and by now you
probably expect this behavior. It's your call. Cookies are the
prescribed way to managing session state in HTTP, not URLs. If you
don't want to accept sessions, that's fine.