[Herts] Changes at Frappr

[Steve Clark]

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A while back I set up a map for the LUG over at Frappr on

http://www.frappr.com/hertfordshirelug

We've got 13 people on there now, but I am having some misgivings about
the future of the service. They have added some neat features, including
a new real-time chat, but other things are going downhill. The homepage
design is a real mess and getting harder to read. Today I noticed that I
had joined more groups without opting in. This seems to have been based
on keywords in my profile. I'll give it a couple of months, but if
things don't improve I think I may unsubscribe.

An alternative mapping approach is to use something like
http://geourl.org/. This reads location data from the header of a web
page to calculate it's location relative to other sites. This relies on
you having a homepage you can edit at that level and that you want to
make that data available. I did this myself some time ago and now the
LUG site also has it, along with at least one other member site. This
gives us something like

http://geourl.org/near?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.herts.lug.org.uk%2Findex.html&dist=30

I've already contacted a couple of Linux users whose sites I found from
GeoURL as potential LUG members.

I have a plan to write a script that spiders from the member site page
to build our own map of members. I need to learn some more Python and
how to use the Google maps API first.

There are some extensions for Firefox that can detect sites with
location data and either take you to GeoURL or display a Google map.

I hope to be at the meeting next week. See you there.

- --
Steve
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