We often get asked why we didn’t seed Spotstory with content from some other source. Certainly, databases with location data are easily obtained and integrated.

I imagine that anyone launching a site that depends on user generated content, or some other sort of social media,  is going to ask themselves this question.  I’m not sure that there is one right answer for everyone’s circumstance, but I can explain how we made our choice.

Pros

Here are a couple of reasons we came up for why we might use seed data.

• Empty sites are no fun We’ve probably all had the experience where we see a site’s launch announcement on TechCrunch or Mashable!, only to find the the site contains only three or four data records (usually someplace in downtown San Francisco.) Seeding with a pre-existing database seems to solve this problem.

This is the big argument for seeding, and, no doubt, for certain services it makes complete sense.

• Scaling You want to make sure your system scales to handle the large datasets (you hope!) you will have some day.

This argument is probably less often voiced, but it should be!  It’s definitely the right thing for everyone to do:  you can use seed data during your development process, and then discard it before you deploy.  You can still keep it around in your development environment.  This is what we do.

Cons

Here are some of the reasons against using seed data.

• The site is still empty anyway We’ve all seen this too: you go to a site, click on a link, or search on a latitude/longitude, or place name and get 1000 results.  You click through them and find … nothing.

Aron and I discussed this at great length when we were getting started.  We’d experienced many sites that were filled with this “empty” data and the sites just felt … empty.  Big certainly, but empty nonetheless.

(I have a lot more to say here, but it’s a tangent to the topic at hand.  I’ll write more about it later, I promise.)

• It’s illegal It’s mechanically easy to access and import data, but do you have the right?

Now, there is a lot of data in Wikipedia that would be appropriate and welcome in Spotstory.  The problem is Wikipedia uses the the GNU Free Documentation License and Spotstory uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License for all text content.  Though these licenses share  the same spirit, they are not the same.

Some might see this as a technicality, but we don’t.  (And, yes, it is a challenge keeping unadulterated Wikipedia content out of Spotstory!)

In the end

In the end, we decided we’d start from scratch, and try to grow as much content as we could before we launched.  We felt it was important that actual people discover and share the Spots.  We thought it best that every Spot have associated with it a person who considered it interesting enough to share with the rest of the community.

Ultimately, this approach seemed most appropriate to the spirit of the site.

We’re based in the Boston area, and we’re happy at this moment to try and build a critical mass of interesting content for this area, and so far it seems to be working out well for us.

But, please, don’t let that keep you from creating Spots in other places! :)

Man, this is some crazy weather we have had over the past few weeks. For those of you not in the Boston area, Thursday was a fun day with rain, sleet, and a little hail. This weekend, a Nor’easter decided to visit, bringing large amounts of rain and violent winds.

This morning, we woke to find that the huge tree at the end of the street had been uprooted! This house is just three doors down. Luckily, it appears that no one is hurt and most of the house is structurally intact; the root structure must be supporting most of this massive weight.

I don’t know when this tree was planted. Like most of Arlington, many homes in our neighborhood were built in the late 1920s. Since this is New England, streets are all tree-lined (if not, I’m certain some archaic statute would be violated). Most of the trees don’t appear to predate the neighborhood construction. This whole area was stripped of lumber (feeding the building demand in Boston) and used as farmland.

This raises some questions about our recently departed tree. It appears to predate the housing in the area. Why did it survive the 1920s construction? If this neighborhood was indeed farmland, was this tree present? Maybe it provided shade for a local farmhouse. We are on top of one of the Arlington hills and have good views of the surrounding land. On a clear day, you can even see into Boston.

About an hour ago, two trucks from a commercial tree service drove up to the tree, stopped for a minute, then drove off. Scared, maybe? Trucks from the Department of Public Works have just started showing up. Backhoes, front loaders, chippers .. no need to watch Extreme Machines today!

Update: And now a crane! The Arlington DPW is pulling out all the stops!

We pushed an update of the system tonight around 11:15 PM ET.  This release primarily fixes issues reported during our launch.

• You can now choose the representative image for Spots and Visits Until now, the image shown on the Spot page, or as a thumbnail next to a Spot summary, would simply be the first image that had been uploaded to the Spot.  This was also true for Visits.  With this release, you can choose which image should be shown.  Just go to the Spot or Visit edit page, and the rest should be obvious.  This was the by far the most often requested enhancement!
• New feedback interface The old feedback interface did a bad thing: after you would go through all of the trouble to send us feedback, we would send you to a page that was not where you were, and with really with no place to go!  That was bad (and we’re sorry!).  The new feedback interface uses a popup which let’s you resume your train of thought once you’ve been kind enough to send us your insights.
• Streamlined goecoding interface for Spots  We’ve changed the way you tell us where a Spot is located.  We’ve taken the separate address lookup, and latitude/longitude entry boxes, and combined them into a single one.  We hope you find this arrangement easier to use.
• Spots can display an address Displaying just the latitude and longitude of Spots was initially neato, but it turns out the novelty wears off after while, and people just want to see the name of a town, a state, or a country.  So now you can associate the actual name of a place, and not just the GPS coordinates, with a Spot.  So, if it makes sense for your Spots to have an address, you can now update them with one.
• Many many other fixes and refinements  Many fixes and refinements, both large and small and too numerous to mention, have been made! 

Once again, we’d like to thank everyone who has sent feedback or dropped us an email for their time and effort.  Many thanks also to everyone that has contributed a Spot, and especially those who have contributed more than one!

Future Updates

We’re going to keep updating Spotstory on a continual basis, but in the future look for each release to have a theme.

This doesn’t mean we won’t be reacting quickly to major problems like we always have: each release will still contain numerous fixes for critical bugs, or problems that just seem particularly pesky.

We haven’t finalized the date of the next release, but it will probably occur in early May.

Thanks again for being a part of Spotstory!

As Matthew mentioned, I was at the Berkman Thursday Meeting on April 12th. I had a great time talking about Spotstory to everyone in attendance.

Thanks to Mike Walsh for the invitation and Erica George for help with some of the logistics.

Extra thanks to everyone who braved the weather on Thursday. From my office window, I watched as the weather cycled through sleet, rain, and maybe a little hail. The Red Sox may have been rained out, but the Berkman Blog Group persevered!

We had a lot of fun presenting at the Boston Ruby Group last night.  We’d like to thank Tom Dyer and everyone else involved with organizing, setting up, providing space, and providing pizza.

Once again, the meeting was well attended: folks were standing along the walls and sitting on the floor.  This month’s program was more Rails-oriented than last month’s, but few people seemed to mind that.

Eric Mill from thoughtbot gave a talk on REST and ActiveResource.  The highlight was definitely Jester, a JavaScript REST implementation  developed at thoughtbot.  It’s modeled after ActiveResource and, boy howdy, does it look neat!

Jeremy Durham did a presentation on Memcache.  Jeremy has spoken at both of the meetings I’ve attended, and on both occasions he’s provided a lot of practical, meat-and-potatos info you can use.

You can find Aron’s presentation here, and mine here.

The group is always looking for speakers, so please volunteer!  If you’re in the Boston area and working with Ruby/Rails, it’s a great way to learn about the subject and to meet folks in the community. 

Our hosting provider had an (unexplained) outage from about 1:55 PM ET to about 4:05 PM ET.  Our apologies for the interruption.

Aron will be showing Spotstory at this week’s Thursday Meeting at Berkman.  The meeting starts at 7:00 PM at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett Street, Cambridge MA.  We’re really looking forward to this.

(Actually, I won’t be there.  I’ve already committed to attend the Social Media Club Boston event, “Ethics and the Social Media Generation Gap,” happening that same evening.  I am afraid can’t wait to see which side of the gap I’m on!)

Boston Ruby Group tonight

Finally, a reminder that both Aron and I will be presenting at tonight’s meeting of the Boston Ruby Group. It starts at 7:00 PM at One Broadway, Cambridge, MA.  Come on by if you’re an experienced Ruby hacker or just curious.

The Boston Marathon is coming up next Monday, and we thought it would be fun to see if people could come up with a bunch of Spots near the marathon’s course.

In preparation, we went up and down the course to seek out all of the mile markers. (This is why I was playing in the middle of the highway.) We’ve collected them in a Boston Marathon Mile Marker tour.  So, if you’re near the course, create some Spots of your own!

There is something peculiar about traveling a route in one mile hops.  It brought to mind two thoughts which would not have appeared with the same clarity had I been bombing through in an automobile; or walking or biking at a much slower pace.

The first was a realization of just how long the course is!  IT’S LONG.  I know everyone knows that it’s long, but something about moving along one measured segment at a time, being aware that I was traveling a mile, made me appreciate what kind of distance I was really covering.

Secondly, stopping for ten to fifteen minutes at each mile marker gave me time to observe how the landscape was changing at each stop: town center becoming wooded area becoming industrial center becoming suburb becoming city.  It was a lot of fun.

I hope you’ll join in, add your own Spots and observations, and give folks something to look at while they’re waiting for the athletes to arrive at their viewing place!

It is quite easy to extend your Ruby on Rails test infrastructure so every document is checked for validity.

1. Install the plugin assert_valid_markup.
2. Install my test_validation_helper.rb in your test directory.
3. Require the validation helper from your test/test_helper.rb:

   require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) +
       "/test/test_validation_helper.rb")

After those three simple steps, your HTML and RSS documents are now being validated each time you run tests.

I am giving a brief presentation on this topic at the April 10, 2007 Boston Ruby Group meeting.

You can flip through a PDF of my slides if you would like more details.

Update: In addition to the PDF, my presentation is now hosted on slideshare and shown below. If you are reading this post in an aggregrator, you will need to click through for the show (or just use the PDF version).

I’m sure we’ve each been told at least once in our lives to “go play in traffic.”  Recently, I’ve actually been spending a lot of time standing in the middle of major Boston roadways and thoroughfares.  More specifically, I’ve been taking photos.

I am not advocating this behavior, but if you find yourself having to stand in the middle of the road, here are some pointers.  I didn’t follow all of my own advice this time, but next time I will! (There’s going to be a next time!?)

• Go early in the morning, preferably on a weekend  There’s less traffic!  Fewer cars means fewer chances of getting hit.  The sound of an approaching auto is also more apparent.
• Wear some bright colors  This time, I wore black.  This probably wasn’t a good choice.  Next time (!?) I’ll wear some sort of fluorescent vest.
• Bring a friend, preferably two, as lookout  This is especially helpful if you’re going to be doing something that causes you to take your eyes off of the road.  It’s even more useful if you’re going to be on roads with hills and curves which limit visibility.
• Be patient  If traffic is heavy, wait!  Unless you’ve gone during rush hour or around lunch, you’ll find a break in the traffic.

Okay, you didn’t need me to tell you any of that, unless you’re less than six years old.

Details on exactly why I was doing this will be forthcoming!