Announcing Buyindie v4
Posted by Vince Wadhwani on May 07, 2007
After a lot of sweat, I'm pleased to announce Buyindie version 4. I'm using Google's API to geocode all the locations (via geokit) so there's now a Buyindie for just about every place on the planet. That means there's no excuse for you not to log in and participate! I seriously need help maintaining the list of indie stores, so if any intrepid readers are passionate about keeping neighborhoods unique and vibrant, drop me a line and we can talk about giving you access to adding stores directly.
I'm using attachment_fu to handle all the pictures and so sometimes the older "I like it" buttons aren't working. Rating still works, but the cool Ajax effect is a little here and there. It's a model validation error which won't affect future songs so don't worry about it too much.
There's also finally an RSS FEED since Buyindie v4 was done in Restful Rails. Here's the link to the feed in case you are interested.
I'd like to says thanks to the following people for their help with Buyindie v4:
- Andrew O'Brien(code)
- Lou Scoras (code)
- Brian Chamberlain(UI)
- Tim Mooney(podcasts)
- Eric Palmerlee(logo & t-shirt design)
There are still bugs to knock out and features to add, but its way better than the last version!
I’m really confused about a few things. When I went to the main page, I got “Uh Oh Shaggy”, which turned out to mean I had to choose my location (can’t it default, or ask me?) I changed to DC and logged in, and it seemed there was nothing going on, just three stories all scrunched up on the left side and a big blank area in the middle.
I clicked on “Bars + Clubs” and got some restaurants (and only about 10 or so). Clicked on “Entertainment Venues” and got nothing! Searched for “Velvet Lounge” and it shows up as Clothing + Accessories?!?!
Click on Restaurants and it’s a larger list of unsorted places. I’m not sure what’s going on, there used to be a way to browse places in order. I can’t seem to find the bands to browse at all…
Also, the search box is a bit confusing. I clicked on “music” and nothing happened. I clicked on “features” and nothing happened. I guess these are behaving as radio buttons?
Anyway, I like buyindie, but I haven’t visited in a while and I’m feeling a little lost….
Dave
Hey Dave,
Thanks for the feedback! Actually Buyindie is supposed to guess your location by IP first, try a few other things, and then default to DC. It’s behaving that way for me but I’ll obviously have to do some more testing as you’re the second person to report this.
I changed around all the categories and, while I got most right, I do have some outliers there. There are a bunch of entertainment venues mixed up with Clothing stores.. I’ll be fixing that manually as I find them. (Just fixed the Black Cat!)
The search box works like Google’s.. you select what you want to search, but no searching happens until you put something in the box. I’ll mess with it to make it more obvious!
Thanks again for the feedback! Any interest in being a neighborhood helper?
vince
Hey There,
Always interesting to see who is using GeoKit. Very cool.
The ip geocoding only works if hostip.info actually has an entry for the ip that comes in. hostip.info is free, so you kinda get what you pay for. That said, they have pretty solid data and volunteers correct mismatches.
But this could explain the above. Just get the ip address and go to hostip.info and check it out manually.
Hope this helps and congrats again.
Bill
Bill Eisenhauer
Hi Bill,
A big thank you for writing GeoKit. I’ll be using it in future projects as well.
It turns out the Oh Oh Shaggy was from a missing line of code. It should be all fixed now.
Thanks again,
vince
PS: Do you happen to know if there’s a rate limit for Google or for host.info? I’d hate for all this to stop working all of a sudden because the site got popular..
vince