I'm kind of an accidental tourist here, but it seems like this is something that could be extended / automated further in such a way that you could very easily roll out *lots* of cities. This might very well create the kind of buzz that would attract end users, not to mention administrator-, and developer-types. "Build it, and they may come...."

Is this not consistent w/ OG's (immediate?) goals?... Do your legal concerns kick in here?...

Curious,
Matthew

On 1/7/06, Christopher Schmidt <crschmidt@crschmidt.net> wrote:
I recently received a request from someone looking to set up the Open
Guide to Atlanta. I spent an hour last night doing the steps that are
needed to set up a new guide on Athena (the boston.og.org webserver):

* Create web directories with appropriate permissions (5 minutes --
   scripted)
* Copy over Boston web directory. This ended up including a couple
   things that I didn't mean for it to, like extra files I had
   accidentally stuck in the directory. Clean those up (10 minutes)
* Grab new gmaps key. (5 minutes)
* Add a temporary domain forward from atlanta.crschmidt.net -- then
   realize that meant I had to get a new gmaps key. D'oh. (10 minutes)
* Modify all the "base" lat and long pairs to use ones that worked for
   Atlanta, rather than ones that worked for Boston. Note that this is
   probably not required if I ever get around to updating my templates
   and configuration to the latest code, since I'm assuming Dom made
   these configuration params. This took about 10 minutes.
* Remove all the Boston-specific stuff - T lines (both special icons
   and the polylines), town boundary drawing, etc. This took the longest
   -- about 15 minutes -- but now that it's done, I can simply copy out
   the Atlanta templates instead of the Boston ones.
* Copied over and set up configuration files for stats (a la
   http://boston.openguides.org/stats/) and webstats (a la
   http://boston.openguides.org/webstats/). 10 minutes.
* Copied over and set up scripts for loading places from
   atlanta.zami.com, added 43 places to the guide, checked it out,
   called it done.

Total time: 1 hour.
Total time next time around: Probably closer to 30 minutes.

hex, when you get back, if you could please set up
atlanta.openguides.org to point to 65.110.51.60 or as a CNAME to Boston,
I'd appreciate it.

Next step: Setting up a couple more Guides, that people can claim from
me later if they want. I'll do the hosting and admin until someone else
comes along who wants to admin the site -- then they can either keep it
on my server, or they can have the data and files and move elsewhere.
The ones that I plan to set up at the moment are:

* Chicago
* Seattle
* Portland

Because I know people who know those areas well enough to add some
content. I would also be happy to set up guides for any of the places
listed on http://zami.com/ -- because I have a spider which can crawl
the data out of there a bit more easily than I'd be able to get it
elsewhere otherwise. If anyone has any requests for these places, I'd
love to hear them, and set them up.

(Note that crawling this data in the US is considered legal -- at least
for the time being. "Collection" protection only comes into play when
there is some level of creativity involved in the data -- which yellow
page listings are not. The original court case regarding this actually
used white pages as an example, which is exactly the data I'm copying at
the moment.)

Also, thanks to rich_gibson of Geocoder.us, Athena now has
non-restricted access to Geocoder.us. Thanks a million for that, Rich!
Geocoder.us offers a ton of great commercial services, so if you're in
the US and wanting to do location lookups, he's a good person to talk
to.

This is long and rambly. I'm going to stop talking, and get on to
working on setting these things up.

--
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer


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