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.
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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On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 04:39:47PM -0500, Matthew Weymar wrote:
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...."
This is true, but I'm not willing to place guides out there with no administrator, because then they become spamtraps rather than actual usable wikis. A wiki requires an active administrator in order to prevent it from falling into spam, and I'm not willing to take on that role for more than a few guides -- Boston sucks up enough of my time without any other things.
Is this not consistent w/ OG's (immediate?) goals?... Do your legal concerns kick in here?...
My concerns are definitely not legal, but pragmatic: I can't keep up with 17 different guides, adding new information, marketing, and making sure that they don't fall to spammers. I'd rather not see guides become huge sources of spam on the web, and as such, I'm unwilling to simply put the guides "out there" without an active maintainer taking an interest in the guide.
Maintaining a guide is a big job. Most people think that wikis make documentation easier, but really, there's a lot more to it than that, and I'm not about to take on much more on my plate. I'll play sysadmin, but I won't play guide admin.
On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 09:40:59AM -0500, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
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.
It's now set up as a CNAME.
NB: This is on the new DNS setup, so relies on the old NS records expiring.
Cheers,
Dominic.
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