Tag: Where Post

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WherePost: update with new features & data!

I spent some time over the past couple of days pushing out a few minor updates to http://wherepost.ca. Here’s the rundown:

  • I imported, and now scrape, the KML file from Matthew Hoy’s mailbox-mapping project. This doubled the size of Where Post, and merges work doing the same thing.
  • I finally got around to adding in a “name” field, per David Eaves’ request of oh-so-long-ago. When you add a mailbox, if you enter a name or twitter handle (neither is linked anywhere), it should set a cookie that’ll remember who you are for next time.
  • I added in some social-sharing buttons. But because I actually dislike the way these look in general, and like the minimal interface WherePost presents, particularly on mobile, these currently only show on the “About” pages. I was thinking I should add these to the “add mailbox” results, but am holding off for now. I would appreciate it if you went ahead and used these though!
  • Caching: Most result-sets are now cached for an hour, although adding a  new mailbox will reset that cache. This is to account for the odd times when it looks like a bot is scraping the site and causes actual load.
  • Post Offices: Because the GooglePlaces API returns Yellow-pages data, whom I don’t like, and in a way that was pretty broken (you’d always get duplicates, for english/french names of the same place, even if the data was identical, plus it’d overlay a link to the Yellow Pages), I’ve removed this, and added in the ability to specify you’re adding a Post Office OR a Mailbox when adding a new location.
  • Feeds! It felt wrong to be pulling in all this data, but not providing an easy way to get it all back out for you to remix however you wanted. So you can now get all the data WherePost has in 2 formats: JSON & KML. To do this, simply go to: http://wherepost.ca/load. This page has a few query-string params you can pass in:
    1)FORMAT: you can pass ?format=kml to get the feed in KML format – JSON is the default.
    2)RECORDS: you can pass ?records=X, where X is an integer to limit the resultset. By default, WherePost will return up to 10,000 records.
    3)SW & NE: to limit your results to a particular region, pass sw & ne coordinate bounds. So, for instance, ?NE=49.350405349378214,-122.72854022578122&SW=49.16644496927114,-123.2606904943359 will *roughly* return all the results in Vancouver

I think that’s all the updates. Let me know if you run into any difficulties!

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WherePost: now even more useful!

Since I launched Where Post? on Friday morning, the response has been pretty gratifying. My thanks to David Eaves for his nice post about Where Post? this morning. I launched the app with a total of 28 mailboxes and 1 post office. Since then, 29 contributors have added in another 400-odd mailboxes and about 20 post offices. (NB: ‘contributors’ are identified currently via a combination of a cookie & IP Address – so it’s not exact, but close enough).

I’m please to announce a very useful addition: Every post office in the Google Maps database, everywhere, pulled in from the Google Places API. I had noticed while adding post offices that there was often an envelope icon already in the map where I wanted to add a post office. After some digging this afternoon, I was able to pull in the places API to just get all the places that identify as a post office.

There’s a few oddities to figure out:

  1. Often each post office is listed 2 or 3 times at least in Canada: The french name & english name appear to be 2 places, and sometimes the post office in english, the post office in french and the store containing the post office are all listed. Odd, and I haven’t yet figured a way to filter this, but still pretty nice.
  2. I have a rate limit of 100,000 queries a day. Given that each time you see the “loading mailboxes” message there’s a query to Google, there’s a distinct possibility I’ll reach that. For now not a worry, but definitely a scaling/caching issue to think about in the future.
  3. Integrating with the “nearest” function. Currently, the “nearest” mailbox is simply pulled from an SQL query – which means that post offices, coming in from Google, are ignored. There’s likely a way to merge the two, but nothing’s coming to mind at the moment.

As always, if you have any suggestions, comments or anything else, please let me know!

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Introducing: Where Post?

Where Post? is a small web-app I wrote over a couple of evenings this week to serve a very particular purpose: To help me, and anyone else, find their nearest mailbox.

The site should work on iPhones, Windows Phones & Androids. It’s meant to run as an app, so you can install it to your home screen for the greatest effect.

There are currently 2 ways of adding new mailboxes – as time permits, I’ll add more:

  1. In the app: to add a new mailbox, click on the “+” at bottom right, then click on the map where you know there’s a box. If you like, add some notes like “next to the garbage can” or “across the street from the pink house” to help people find it.
  2. Instagram: You can also take a picture of a mailbox on instagram, tag it #wherepost and include a location. A mailbox, with the photo you took, will be added at that location. Your photo’s caption will become the notes for the mailbox. I think it’s a fun use of the instagram API.

Of course, you can also simply find directions to the nearest mailbox to you. Just click on the magnifying glass, and Where Post? will provide you with walking directions to the nearest box (within 2km).

The app is very much a work-in-progress – to come is the ability to add in Post Offices, as well as pick-up/drop-off locations for the various courier companies, so that eventually, it’s a one-stop place to go to find where to send something from. Any and all feedback is much appreciated. In particular, if you know how to change the cursor icon in Google Maps v3, I’d love to know how.

So please have a look, play with it and send me any feedback you might have!

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