Atlas Quest

New (and improved!) search options!

2012-01-09T00:17:00.000-08:00

Once again, I'm pushing the envelope
known as progress.... =)

If you wander over to the Advanced Search page, you'll notice a couple of minor changes. It doesn't look like much, but it's a lot trickier than you might think. I spent the better part of a week getting these changes to work properly. =)

Okay, admittedly, I haven't exactly been working "full time" this week, but these updates probably took up a solid 20 hours of effort on my part.

But I digress....

The updates are remarkably complicated, but I'm throwing out all technical jargon, simplifying my explanation, and completely overlooking certain subtle points completely. So, in a nutshell:

Everyone should see a new checkbox under the location labeled "Use exact locations." If you used to use "0 miles" in order to search for all boxes within a specified city, you should now use this checkbox instead. It also should be used in area searches when you want to see all mystery boxes within that area.
The mystery box icon looks exactly the same as before, but it works slightly differently than before. It now will match any letterbox that has the mystery icon on it. It used to check the location of each box (either the owner-supplied location, or your custom location if you had one), and if that location was a mystery location, the box would match. I had wanted a search that allowed you to get a list of all unsolved mystery boxes in an area. Understandably, this caused confusion, and long story short, now the mystery location icon simply matches boxes that actually have a mystery icon attached to them and the listed location of the box has no bearing on the results.
And the last new option only premium members will be able to see--right next to "use exact locations" is "use original locations." Premium members can enter custom locations--a nice little perk! And once you added a custom location to a letterbox, AQ returned results as if the box were at your custom location. By checking this option, you can tell AQ to ignore your custom locations and force the site to use the original locations supplied by the owner of the box. I'm not really sure how this could possibly be useful, but more than one person has asked about such an option, so I've made it available. =)

There are a few other tweaks I made to the search--AQ runs a mean "Northern California" search now with a slick new technique I'd never used before. (The code applies to more than just Northern California, but that's the test case I was checking the most.) You don't really have to know all of the nitty gritty details except that the search results are much improved over the previous incarnation.

There's also a new "0 mile" hack, which The Vs stumbled onto already by accident. It's another feature that's available if, for some reason, you really want it, but honestly, I can't think of a single reason why you would. Consequently, I don't really recommend using it unless you really know what you're doing. It doesn't hurt anything to use it, but you might not get the results you were expecting if you aren't sure about how it works.

I'd also like to give extra kudos for Eidolon. Over the years, he's been one of the best bug finders on AQ, finding tiny little problems that others have overlooked for months or even years. I'm sometimes quite impressed with his eye for detail and things that just don't "seem right." And he always takes it one step further by including all relevant information about how he generated the error condition including links to searches and boxes so I can recreate the problem easily and fix it.

While this update may not seem like much, it actually was rather complicated involving a lot of moving parts, and I was more than a little concerned that I had overlooked some important problems, so I fired off an e-mail to Eidolon explaining some of the changes I made and asked if he'd like to kick the tires. Then I went for lunch. =)

Wassa Jr partied a little too hard during New Years.
He's finally getting over his hangover....
...his next court appearance is scheduled next month.

When I got back, he had already located two substantial bugs in the update (although he didn't seem to realize one of them was a bug at the time!) A few more tweaks, a few more bug fixes, and now I'm feeling good about the update. Solid work. Thanks, Eidolon! It's nice when I can announce a new feature and have it working correctly right out of the starting gate. (Disclaimer: This in no way implies that there aren't anymore bugs to be found--but any that are still lurking will be a lot more difficult to find due to Eidolon's efforts!)

And Happy New Year!

Looking Forward....

2011-12-27T23:00:00.000-08:00

What ideas are floating through my head regarding AQ next year? Actually, I don't really have many. Oh, there's a long list of things I want to do, but I don't really know which features I'll work on next usually until I actually decide to start working on them. The photo gallery really needs a complete re-do from the ground up. That would be a major undertaking, and I'd want to make sure I have at least several months available before I start to tackle that beast. There are some tutorials I'd like to create. I'm always creating new themes, but I couldn't tell you which ones I'm most likely to do. (Well, the state themes I've already committed to, but beyond that, I have ideas... but no idea which ones I'll actually use.)

I also want to start creating more LTCs. Those LTCs many of you send in for the Majorie's Potpourri are quite inspirational, and I want to do stuff like that! Maybe 2012 will be the year I get down and start being more creative. =)

I also have it in my head that I want to develop http://www.atlasquest.mobi into a mobile-specific website. I've played around with it a little on my develop machine already, but largely abandoned my efforts when Aiphid created Box Radar. Suddenly, I'm getting no requests at all for mobile apps anymore. =) But I find the idea an intellectual challenge and an intriguing one at that, so I find myself still wanting to pursue it. Additionally, I like the idea of limiting myself to the public AQ API that those Android and iPhone apps use. I kind of feel like I neglect that API too much because I don't actually use it myself. My motivation increases dramatically when I use a feature myself! =) It would be an excellent way to test my own API and get a user's point of view for it. So perhaps I'll run with that feature in 2012.

Or perhaps not? Like I said, I don't really know. I tend to work on whatever hits me as most interesting, or best use of my time, or whatever floats my boat. I'll finish a major upgrade, then I scroll through old, bookmarked posts with suggestions and work on those for awhile. They're usually relatively quick and easy changes--and after a couple of weeks of this, I'll settle on the next "big thing" I want to work on and start working.

And perhaps I'll wind up building a feature I haven't even thought of us. Or I'll finally figure out a solution to a problem that prevents me from implementing a feature I really want. (That whole custom location feature I've wanted for years but couldn't figure out how to pull off until this year!)

One thing I know will happen--the number of regression tests for Atlas Quest will increase substantially! But that's not something you'll see directly. =)

One other thing I know: I'll be in Northern California on May 20th, from 6:26 PM through 6:31 PM. Which is actually something of a surprise to me--when I woke up this morning, I assumed I'd be somewhere in Northern Spain during that time. =) Yep, for those five minutes, I'll do just about everything in my power to be there in Northern California.

In an annular eclipse, the moon doesn't quite cover the
entire surface of the sun so you wind up with a
"ring of fire."

I learned just this afternoon that there's an annular eclipse that runs directly through Northern California, which is a relatively easy place for me to travel to (as long as I'm not in Northern Spain!). Annular eclipses are pretty darned awesome and an extremely rare astronomical event, and they follow a very narrow path only a few hundred miles wide. Check out the entire eclipse path at http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEgoogle/SEgoogle2001/SE2012May20Agoogle.html. Most of you in Nevada will also be able to watch it, along with a large portion of Utah and New Mexico. I've already listed an event for anyone who wants to join me for this amazing astronomical spectacle. I'm still trying to work out an exact viewing location, but I'll likely be within an hour's drive of Redding, CA. =)

But what's an annular eclipse? It's a lot like a total solar eclipse.... except that the moon isn't quite big enough to completely cover the sun. Due to the slightly elliptical orbits of the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun, their apparent sizes change slightly. Sometimes the moon can completely cover the surface of the sun--a total solar eclipse--but when it doesn't, it's an annular eclipse and you'll see a ring of fire completely encircling the moon. Amanda and I saw one in Panama several years ago and it was absolutely spectacular! Well worth a view if you live anywhere near the eclipse path! *nodding* The next annular eclipse in the United States doesn't happen until 2023 so if you miss this one, you'll have quite a wait to see the next one. (Full disclosure: There actually is a total solar eclipse that cuts through the US from coast to coast in 2017, but your next opportunity to see a "ring of fire" around the moon won't be until 2023.)

If you want to watch a transit of Venus,
do it on June 5th. Your next opportunity to
measure the size of the solar system
doesn't come until 2117!

There's another rare astronomical event happening on June 5th--Venus transits across the sun for the last time in over a hundred years. If you miss this transit, you'll never see another one in your lifetime. The Venus transit across the sun actually has some historical significance--measuring the time it took Venus to cross the sun's surface was the first time scientists were able to calculate the size of our solar system. For many years they knew the relative ratios of the distance from the earth to each of the planets--but they didn't know the absolute distances. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure how measuring the time that Venus transits the sun can be used to calculate the size of the solar system, but I still think it's pretty darned cool! On a side note, if you want to tell your friends that you helped measure the size of the ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM, they're apparently making an app to do that. =)

So you can be pretty certain I'll be looking at the sun during this time, but where I view it from is a lot more flexible than the annular eclipse. In fact, I'll probably just walk out on our deck to watch it. =) To view the entire transit, though, I might make an effort to go up to Alaska. (It's either that or fly to China, Japan, Australia, or New Zealand, but those are more difficult and expensive for me to travel to!)

I want to see these two astronomical events so bad that I decided to postpone my Camino de Santiago thru-hike until the autumn instead of doing it in the spring like I originally intended. =) Neither of these events would be visible from Spain! I plan to take two or three months hiking through France, Spain, and (maybe) Portugal, undoubtedly an epic adventure that you'll be reading all about on Another Long Walk. =) Which really has absolutely nothing to due with Atlas Quest, but fortunately all of the lodging and churches along the way each of their own stamps so I'll still be doing plenty of stamping along the way. =) And probably plant a few boxes as well....

Speaking of the camino, a.k.a. The Way of St. James, there's a movie out in theaters now called The Way starring Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. Martin Sheen hikes the camino, carrying the ashes of his son (played by Emilio Estevez before he becomes ashes!). It was filmed on location on the very trail I intend to hike--and it's a very entertaining film to boot. I'm not saying that just because I intend to hike the trail! =) This film didn't give me the idea to hike the trail--I first got the idea to hike the trail from reading The Journey in Between by Keith Foskett, a hiker I met while thru-hiking the PCT. (I'm still waiting to get the PCT book he's in the process of writing!)

So those are some of the things I'm looking forward to in 2012. More features and improvements to AQ--even though I don't know which features I'll actually implement as of yet. And two rare astronomical events, and a thru-hike in Europe. Yep, 2012 is looking good!

Share your plans for 2012 in the comments! =)

Reflecting Back and Looking Ahead

2011-12-26T22:53:00.000-08:00

While 2011 may not officially be done just yet, it's safe to say that the bulk of it is. =) And it's that time of year to reflect back on the past year and start looking ahead to next year. I'm not one to make New Year's Resolutions (unless "surviving through the end of the year" counts as a resolution), but it doesn't mean I have no ideas about what I'll be doing in the upcoming year. =)

But first, looking back on AQ, I see three major accomplishments and improvements that I'm absolutely thrilled about. The first and most difficult was figuring out a solution to how people could list custom locations for letterboxes. In the end, I spent months developing that feature, and improved numerous additional features that the changes touched. The geocoders were upgraded and improved, trip planner searches, area searches, linear searches and rectangular searches were expanded to work with events, blogs, and and even virtuals. The trip planner was updated to support much more detailed route information--a significant improvement, albeit an incomplete one. Maps showing the coordinates used now showed up, and listing custom locations that geocoders can't find was significantly improved. And even after I got the custom locations feature up and running, I then had to go in and carefully remove all of the old code that AQ used to use.

But darn it, the update worked, and life was good. =)

I did run into numerous problems, and some of the updates broke stuff that--frankly--should never have broken. And they wouldn't have broken had I run regression tests on them. Without getting too technical, regression tests are simply a way to have a computer automatically run a bunch of tests on the website to check that everything still works as expected whenever I make a change. Many times, a tweak in one part of the code can break something in a completely different (and forgotten) section of code.

And that became my second great update for 2011: regression tests. I started with nothing, but built up a test scaffolding that could check AQ for thousands of different problems with the click of a button. After a a couple of months, I had several hundred tests up and working--and surprisingly, it even caught some bugs that had been on AQ since day one!

This was largely a silent update, though. None of you will ever see this code in action--it's strictly for myself. The benefit to you is two-fold, however. First, I'm less likely to break stuff when I upload changes. Secondly, I can spend less time debugging problems and more time working on new feature or improving existing ones. =)

As of today, there are nearly 2,000 regression tests that I can run with the click of a mouse button on my development machine. For a website as large and complicated as Atlas Quest, it's really nowhere near enough. I'd prefer to have over 10,000 regression tests. Perhaps 100,000 tests could really put AQ through its paces, but for now, there are nearly 2,000.

I don't sit down and develop regression tests anymore. Well, I do still create them, but I create new ones when I'm developing a new feature or editing an existing feature. Whenever a bug is reported and found, I create a regression test that can check for that problem in the future, fix the bug, and make sure the regression test passes. So the number of regression tests continue to grow quickly, but that's in conjunction with whatever feature I'm working on at the time. When I first started creating them, I sat down and merely started creating them to have a base to start with. As I develop and improve features, though, I flesh them out more.

And the last big project I tackled was a dramatic improvement of the Trip Planner. What is available today is something I've wanted to create for years, but the time and effort involved with such a massive update never seemed worth it. A little bit ironically, what made the effort worth it this time was due to my first big project of the year: custom locations.

When I developed custom locations, it completely and utterly broke the existing trip planner. And while the trip planner certainly had its flaws, it was also a very popular option for people. I considered chugging the trip planner completely rather than spend the effort to rewrite it to work with the new changes, but I knew that would put me in the doghouse with a lot of people. It might be a lot of work, but rewriting the trip planner to work with the new geocoders and custom locations was a must.

Knowing where I've always wanted to take the trip planner, however, I made sure to design it in such a way that eventually I could extend it to fill my original idea for the feature. So during the creation of custom locations, I laid the foundation for what would later become the trip planner of today.

Fast forward a few months and now I look at what it would take to create the trip planner of my dreams, and it no longer seemed so far out of reach anymore. There was still an enormous amount of work to do, but I already already laid down a solid foundation to build from. I wouldn't have to start from scratch like I would have had to do before the custom location feature. The awesomeness of the feature was now worth the effort required to create it.

And create it I did. Along with over 500 regression tests for the trip planner that I can use to make sure whenever I make a tweak, I don't break anything. Some bugs did slip through, but considering the thousands of lines of new code I created, it was one of the most successful updates ever with very little downtime or problems. Previous updates of this magnitude, I'd dedicate two or three days for nothing but fixing bugs. This time around, only five bugs were found during that timespan. Unprecedented!

There were hundreds of smaller updates throughout the year. I started the state themes, one new state theme each month. I fixed typos, updated the layouts of many pages, replaced the weather widget, upgraded the server software, improved slow queries to help keep the website running fast, and so forth. But when I look back, it's those "big three" features I'm most proud of. They weren't easy or quick--in fact, part of the reason I enjoyed working on them so much was because they were a challenge and made me think. =) Admittedly, a lot of the smaller and less technical changes I kind of find boring and monotonous. I really do thrive on building features that are an intellectual challenge for me!

And each of the new features, I feel, took AQ to a whole new level. More reliable, more stable, and easier than ever to sort through the tens of thousands of letterboxes listed on AQ for those handful that matter most to each individual.

I didn't mean for this post to get so long..... I'll save my "looking ahead" thoughts for tomorrow! =) Feel free to share your favorite updates from the year in the comments!

'Twas the Week Before Christmas.....

2011-12-21T13:02:00.000-08:00

I feel like posting. I don't really have anything to say, however, so if your time is limited, keep moving along. Don't read this post. =) Really, no joke--there's nothing important here. No new news, no exciting developments. Just some musings and stuff I've been working on lately, but it's stuff you really don't have to concern yourself about.

This morning I've spent tweaking the radius of several dozen locations on Atlas Quest. I got a report that a box listed in Sedona, Arizona, wasn't showing up as expected. Most of the time I get reports like this, I tend to roll my eyes. Nine times out of ten, it's because there's a problem with the search. The person is hiding their plants and finds, for instance. Or they had inadvertently clicked the "ignore" button on the box and didn't realize it. Or the box doesn't have a clue listed and most default searches won't display boxes without clues. Or something. There are a lot of reasons a box might not show up in a certain search, and most of the time I get reports like this, there's absolutely nothing wrong except the search that was run.

But.... one time out of ten, there's a bigger issue involved and does require my attention, so I have to investigate anyhow. And this was one of those one time out of ten. The Yahoo Geocoder, for some bizarre reason, listed the radius of Sedona as being a little over 100 miles! I've been to Sedona before, and it's certainly not that big!

The Google Geocoder returns a radius of just over 3 miles--certainly a lot more reasonable, and I changed the radius of Sedona accordingly. A box "somewhere" in a 100+ mile radius isn't going to show up in a search for boxes "within 30 miles" of Sedona, which was the problem in a nutshell. With the smaller radius, it will. Problem fixed....

Or is it? How many other towns on AQ have 100+ mile radiuses? Realistically, the answer should be ZERO. In fact, anything larger than about 30 miles is suspect. So I poked around and found several dozen of them. Most of them cities I'd never heard of before. Buffalo Grove, IL--32 miles in radius? Really? Strathpeffer, Germany was listed as 404 miles in radius!

So I spent a few hours fixing all of these locations. The vast majority of locations were within reasonable bounds, but those several dozen certainly needed some tweaks.

Now the problem is fixed.... right? Well, no, not completely. There's still the matter of making sure this issue doesn't come again in the future. There are hundreds of thousands of locations that AQ doesn't know about, that if someone runs a search or hides a letterbox, will require AQ to use the geocoders to look up the necessary information. The very same geocoders that generated the bad data in the first place. I need some sanity checks in the code.

I happened to notice this photo in the AQ Photo Gallery.
Remember (especially you, One Particular Harbor!),
all extra cookies you have can be sent to me. =)

I dived into the code itself, specifically the part that looked up the radius of a location, and added a few lines of code that checked if the radius was larger than 30 miles for any given park, address, or town, and--if so--would verify the radius with a second geocoder. And if that second geocoder verified the unusually large size, to ignore the geocoders completely and set the radius to 25 miles.

That second part--ignoring the verified radius--I was torn about. Some locations larger than 30 miles are completely legit. One location was "Sequoia National Forest." Sequoia National Forest IS much larger than 30 miles in radius, so why would I falsely cut the radius to 25 miles? I did so so boxes listed in "Sequoia National Forest" would show up in default searches (which defaults to 30-mile searches). I figured the location was specific enough that it should show up in default searches, even if, technically speaking, such locations normally wouldn't or shouldn't. Kind of a gut feeling type of thing. Technically wrong, but it feels right. =)

And finally I was done. Well, actually, no, not quite. One more thing to do.... testing. I tweaked some code, and I should have my unit tests check that this new code actually works like it's supposed to. So I created a new unit test that checks for these specific conditions, made sure they passed muster, then finally uploaded the changes I made.

All because a letterbox in Sedona wasn't showing up in the search results as expected. =)

Nobody would likely even notice these changes--they're very subtle and affected such a tiny number of letterboxes, you'd have to have a sharp eye indeed to have noticed them. But it still makes AQ a tiny, little bit better.

Yesterday I spent primarily working on themes. I finished up the Maine theme--which isn't scheduled to go live on AQ until next November if I counted correctly. I want a solid backlog of state themes so I can continue to release them once per month without fail, regardless of how hectic my life might be at any given time. =) Next year, I want to thru-hike El Camino de Santiago--a hike that will take two or three months. I certainly won't have time during the hike to create themes, so I need to create them well in advance. Hey, Mainers, I really like how your theme turned out! It's currently my default theme on my development machine! =) You're up next, Maryland! (My goal was to finish all of the state themes I'd use for next year by the end of this year.)

I also made a few tweaks to the Christmas theme. The Christmas theme really isn't one of my favorite themes. I like the animations, the colors are hard on my eyes. The yellow background for the submenus was bothering me, so I lightened those a bit. I also didn't like how a highlighted menubar option blended in with the red background behind it near the top, so I lightened the highlighted menubars as well. And the bell in the upper-left corner of the page was messing up the layout of the home page, so I got rid of that.

I tend to do this sort of thing quite frequently with old themes that bother me. A few tweaks here and there to make it a little more appealing.

About a month ago, I started looking up all of the 2012 holidays to update when each of the themes would show. Themes like Christmas always show at the same time year after year and don't require changes, but themes like Friday the 13th, total lunar eclipses, and Presidents Day do need adjusting each year. And what to do if a total lunar eclipse falls on a Friday the 13th on Presidents Day, no less?! (While that specific scenario has never happened, there are enough themes that every year involves at least a few conflicts of this sort.) It takes me several hours each year to update the theme schedule for the next year.

Yesterday, I also found myself with a 50% off one item coupon for Michaels, so I wandered down to the local store and purchased myself a large block of Speedy-Stamp. *rubbing hands gleefully* There's also a stamp I want to carve, but I'm not sure this particular block is large enough for my purposes.... So I'll probably carve a couple of stamps during the next few days. =) Not sure when or where I'll hide them as boxes, but at least the stamps will be done!

I might post a bit more later.... for now, though, I plan to get started on a Maryland theme. =) Hope you all are enjoying the holidays and getting to spend enough time with your families that you're ready to leave them! ;o)

The New and Improved Trip Planner!

2011-12-16T23:52:00.000-08:00

Interstate 94

First, an update on my last post asking for volunteers to adopt a highway.... Wow! What an amazing group of people! In alphabetical order, the following people helped out with improving the existing routes: Aiphid, Amanda from Seattle, BanjoMan, BfloAnonChick, Bumble, Dizzy, Eidolon, PI Joe, speedsquare, Suduko Crazy, and Wronghat. They've been plotting and fixing and helped run through about 83,000 miles of roads, trails, and historic routes! If you've noticed that all of your trip searches seem generate more accurate results, you can thank these people for making it so. =)

For you Canadians out there, you'll find some support for the Trans-Canada Highway now, with much help from Bumble. =)

Not only that, but they've done a darned good job helping to find bugs and problems, so they've really gone above and beyond. Thanks to you all!

And now, to introduce the rest of you to the improvements. Under the 'Toolbox' menubar option, you'll see a link for Trip Planner. There, you'll find options to search what trips are available on Atlas Quest, along with a list of the newest trips that have been created. If you select a specific trip, it'll display some information about the trip, including a map of the route. Take the Pacific Crest Trail, for instance. It tells me the route is nearly 2,000 miles long, the accuracy is 2.7 segments per mile (larger is typically better, and 2.7 totally rocks!), and a list of towns that the trail passes through (or near) along the way.

If you're a premium member, though, you'll see a couple of more options--such as a button to create your own route. Now this is my favorite part. =) Let's say you're going on a road trip to visit Grandma for Christmas. (I plan to!) You can type in your starting location and destination, and AQ will map a route for you--turn by turn. Depending on how long and detailed your route is, it might take AQ a few minutes to crunch the numbers, but when it's done, you can then run a letterbox search along your route. (Or an event search, or virtual search--or any search that requires a location.) Your route will even show up as an option on the Trip Planner Search.

You can keep the route private. Right now, I'm not expecting any of you to travel with me from my mom's house to Grandma's house for Christmas. ;o) But if you create a route that you think others might find useful (perhaps California's well-known Highway 1?), you can make it available to other premium members.

And really, that's all there is to it. Creating and editing routes is strangely hypnotic--I hooked in Google Maps to help with that process and it's remarkably easy to create very detailed routes.

Happy travels! =)

Adopt a Highway!

2011-11-28T11:57:00.001-08:00

Aiphid's US Route 1

A few weeks ago, Aiphid asked me how he could get US Route 1 added to the Trip Planner on Atlas Quest. So I explained to him the tedious process of plotting the entire route, from end to end, which is inputted into Atlas Quest. And usually, when someone asks me about a route, that's where it ends. The person walks away and says, "Yeah, that sucks."

But not Aiphid. Oh, no.... he actually went in and started plotting the US Route 1 from somewhere in Maine to Key West, Florida. In all, there were about 1,400 plotted points--which is pretty remarkable. By comparison, when I did Interstate 95, I plotted a measly 159 points to mark the route. To be fair, there were reasons why the route was so poorly plotted out, but it was a remarkable amount of work.

And then I did absolutely nothing with it. The problem for me, you see, is that when I did the great Geocoder Update, I made some significant upgrades to how the trip planner worked. It allowed for much more accurate and precise information than ever before. One thing I did not upgrade, however, was my code to upload a new route. I no longer had any working code to upload the wonderfully detailed route Aiphid had created!

So my latest project has been to recreate this ability. Not only that, but to allow anyone to upload their own routes. Not only that, but to make it easier and faster than ever before. It's still a tedious, mind-numbing process to plot out thousands of points for a route--I've found no way around that--but the process of doing it could be made much easier. =)

And last night, I updated AQ with my updates. I'm still working on some stuff so I'm going to share all of the new features just yet... with a few exceptions.

I used Aiphid's route to test the new code. Works great! =) Which also means you'll now see "US Route 1" as the last option in the Trip Planner. Enjoy! And thank Aiphid for the new route if you ever find yourself using it. =)
Like the map image at the beginning of this post? AQ generated it for me. Well, technically, Google generated the map, but based on the information from AQ. =) Soon, you'll be able to see such images for all routes. You'll even be able to zoom in and see exactly what AQ is using to calculate distances from the route. And if you've ever wondered why the distances sometimes seem so screwed up, this will show the reason!
I used Aiphid's route to test the creation of a new route. I also wanted to test the editing of an existing route and spent four hours this morning re-mapping 2,932 vertices that make up Interstate 5. So if you do any searches along I-5, you'll find that the distances are very accurate now along the entire route. (On a side note, AQ is still processing the data for I-5 which should take a few hours. So technically, you might get "unusual" results during that timespan. When it's done, though....) The limiting factor with precision is no longer the route, but the precision of the location for each letterbox.
When you manually write out a Trip Planner search from the Advanced Search page, you'll usually type something like "along I-5 FROM San Diego, CA to Los Angeles, CA." Now, you can also call other commonly known names such as the "along the San Diego Freeway from San Diego to Los Angeles" and it'll work too. AQ, however, isn't particularly smart about where that particular name starts or ends along the route--as far as it knows, all of I-5 is called the San Diego Freeway. Other names that will work in place of I-5 include Pacific Highway, Cascade Wonderland Highway, West Side Freeway, Grand Army of the Republic Highway, Santa Ana Freeway, and Golden State Freeway.

And finally--what the title of this post is about: Adopting a highway! It took me about four hours to plot I-5 accurately, and there are currently 74 routes supported on AQ. At this rate, it would take me nearly 300 hours to re-plot all of the routes. (Okay, maybe a little less--I-5 is one of the longest routes supported. Most routes are shorter!) And frankly, if you had to wait for me to fix all of the routes, you'll likely be waiting for years.

But another new feature I've added is the ability to transfer ownership of routes to other members, and I'm looking to adopt all of these routes out. =) Aiphid gets Route 1, and I've already done I-5, but all other routes are up for grabs. If you've ever wanted to fix problems with a route you travel frequently, now's your chance! And, as a special incentive, anyone who adopts and fixs up a route also get first access to a number of new features including making your own personal routes. =) One catch, though--you do have to be a premium member in order to volunteer. Personal routes are going to be a premium-member perk.

I'm also interested in adding new routes for Canada and Europe. If you are interested in creating such routes, let me know. =)

Quick Links!

2011-11-12T00:47:00.001-08:00

My fancy icons just got fancier!

You can't see any difference with the icons by people's names, but its there. Now, those big icons sometimes actually link to useful information--much more than the help pages it used to link to!

For instance, take that trophy. We all know it represents the number of letterboxes that person has planted. Clicking on it used to take you to a page that told you this. But wouldn't it be more useful to have it link to my logbook's plant page? So now it does!

The ribbons link to my logbook's finds page. Well, technically, my preferences are set to hide finds, so it'll go to option number two which is to display my plants page. However--assuming one's preferences aren't set to hide your finds--clicking it will take you that person's finds.

And clicking the stars? That'll take you to that person's most recent posts.

And the premium member hat? That'll take you to the premium membership page.

The updated profile icon--that egg with sunglasses--that one now takes you to that person's profile.

And--hopefully, you'll never see this icon by your own name--but the R.I.P. icon links to that person's tribute page.

The rest of the icons didn't seem to have a natural "landing" page like these did, so they continue to link to the icon help in the help pages.

http://YourTrailname.AtlasQuest.com

2011-11-09T20:05:00.000-08:00

Wassa Jr's first Halloween. Wassa seemed more
interested in the food than the costumes, though!

Are you a blogger? Do you think http://blogname.blogspot.com is the lamest URL ever? Starting today, you can upgrade to an atlasquest.com domain name! Which is perfect for any letterboxing blog you might be running. (You can use them for non-letterboxing blogs as well, but those readers may not appreciate how cool it is to attach your blog to the atlasquest.com domain!)

What's a subdomain?

A subdomain is the part that comes before the domain name in a URL. For instance, the domain name for Atlas Quest is AtlasQuest.com. The subdomain, for most pages on Atlas Quest is www. This blog, however, uses another subdomain: blog. As in, http://blog.atlasquest.com--a very different website! That's the power of a subdomain.

So what subdomains are available?

I suspect that most people would prefer to have their trailname as a subdomain, but you can choose anything you want. If you aren't sure your choice is available, try typing it in—you'll get a 'server not found' error for unused subdomains. Subdomains made up of inappropriate words or language will not be released, nor can you acquire anyone else's trail name. We don't want you impersonating other innocent members, after all! Only letters and numbers are allowed as part of a subdomain.

How long do I get the subdomains?

For all practical purposes—forever! So long as Atlas Quest stays in business—and we plan to be around for decades to come!—we'll keep your subdomains working. However, any content you post to the subdomains are expected to comply with the Terms of Service and you subdomain can be revoked if we find you posting material inappropriate for Atlas Quest. We won't actively monitor your blogs or content, but if abusive or inappropriate material is brought to our attention, the subdomain may be revoked with no notice or compensation.

Are other domain names available?

We can hook you up with any domain name we own including AtlasQuest.net, AtlasQuest.org, AtlasQuest.co, AtlasQuest.info, and several other variations. While all of these are technically available, we don't really expect anyone to be interested in them. Everyone is most familiar with AtlasQuest.com, after all.

Where can I host my blog or other content?

Wassa Jr has time to think about what he did wrong....

Purchasing a subdomain does not include any hosting services—just the URL name. Hosting content must be done through another source. For Bloggers (a.k.a. Blogspot) out there, this is incredibly easy to set and and entirely free. Blogger will host your photos, posts, and other content for absolutely free, and this is what the official Atlas Quest Blog uses. The URLs for your post will use the subdomain you purchased, but all of the content and tools to manage your blog all come through Blogger's servers through a feature they call 'custom domains.'

You can probably use a similar feature for places like WordPress or personal websites, and we'll be happy to try to work with you to see if that's possible, but Blogger's custom domain feature is the only one we're familiar with and can guarantee will work properly. (If you want to try another option, do let me know and we can try to figure out if we can make it work for you. If it doesn't work, I'll refund your money.)

What if I already have a blog on Blogger?

Not a problem! Once the custom domain feature is set up and working, all of your old content, photos, and links to http://blogname.blogspot.com will redirect to http://trailname.atlasquest.com automatically. You'll see this happen with the official AQ blog by trying to go to the original URL for the blog: http://atlasquest.blogspot.com. Notice the link automatically redirects to the blog.atlasquest.com subdomain on Atlas Quest.

What if I don't already have a blog on Blogger?

Creating one is free! Go for it! =) Just go to http://www.blogger.com to get started. You don't even need a subdomain on Atlas Quest to get it started.

How much does this cost?

For premium members, a lifetime subdomain is just $59. For non premium members, the lifetime subdomain is $99. There are no annual prices available for subdomains—it's a lifetime gig only.

What if I need to change my subdomain?

If you want to change any information about your subdomain—either the subdomain you use (perhaps you changed your trailname?) or change your hosting provider (from Blogger to WordPress, for instance?)—it will cost $20.

What if I change my mind?

We have a 30 day money back guarantee. If, within 30 days, you aren't satisfied with your subdomain, we'll refund 100% of your money!

Where do I sign up?!

Send an AQ mail to Green Tortuga to get started.

Chance of Rain Today, and Rain Tomorrow

2011-10-29T19:57:00.000-07:00

A view of the new WeatherBug widget.

Fluffy Cow has this announcement to make about the new and improved weather widget:

Ryan was messing with stuff again, and he has reinvented the weather widget wheel. Or so he says. At least this time it didn't require kicking everyone off of AQ, so I for one, am happy. SO for everyone who can't look out a window to see if it is raining or not... here is what the new and improved weather widget will do for you:

The weather widget will now accurately predict your forecast for 7 days after you enter a valid credit card number. You can also see a bunch of silly statistical things that pretty much only men will care about like rain totals and wind speeds... Because we all know how much men care about breaking wind.... speeds. (To be read in "what about Bob voice") I'M BLOGGING!!! I'M BLOOOOGING!!!! I blogged! I blog!!! Ha ha. Okay. Back to work.... um....

So really the best thing I see about this whole widget that Ryan invested his blood, sweat and tears into (ok maybe more like 15 minutes and a hangnail) is that you can get the weather report for an AQ event, which would be really great for when the NC people decide to have an event and it ends up being like 12 degrees and Mama Wolf chickens out and doesn't come, so everyone enjoy the fruits of Ryan's labor and be sure to play with his widget!!! Often.

As Trekkie Gal then replied, "Oh my."

Indeed!

A couple of follow up points I'd like to make, however. First, the WeatherBug widget will be for premium members only. There's a quota on the number of times I can access their data feed, and if everyone used it, I'd easily go way over the quota. So for now, at least, this version will only be available for premium members.

Lots of new information with this weather feed! Rain totals, wind gusts, and more!

This weather widget is smarter than the previous one, so if you've listed a home location in your preferences or a location in your profile, the widget will automatically default to your listed location. If you haven't set those, it'll default to AQ Headquarters. (Seattle, in case you're wondering.) Also--you are no longer limited to zip codes. Locations from around the world are now supported.

I've also added a weather button to events, which is new. And, if the event is coming up soon, it'll display the forecast for the day(s) of the event right there with all of the other event information. Very cool! =)

So there you have it. =) And straight from the cow's mouth.....

2012 Letterboxing Calendars Have Arrived!

2011-09-26T02:26:00.000-07:00

Location: Alki, Seattle, WA

Thanks to everyone who submitted photos for the 2012 calendar--you guys really did an amazing job out there!

Order yours today!

If I used one of your photos, you'll have a free calendar coming your way. And if you'd like to score a free 2013 calendar next year, start submitting your photos for the next calendar! =)

January

Location: Seward SeaLife Center, Seward, AK
Photo by: Mark and Sue Pepe

February

Location: Palm Springs Mountains, CA
Photo by: Clarinet 226

March

Location: Newport, OR
Photo by: Yiker

April

Location: El Santuario de Chimayo, NM
Photo by: Twinville Trekkers

May

Location: Burke County, NC
Photo by: The Wolf Family

June

Location: Twin Falls, ID
Photo by: FrogiNater

July

Location: Damascus, MD
Photo by: yachtygirl

August

Location: Watkins Glenn, NY
Photo by: The JaJa's

September

Location: Weiser River, ID
Photo by: Yak King blues

October

Location: Ha Ha Tonka State Park, MO
Photo by: Hart x6

November

Location: Chuckanut Mountain, WA
Photo by: Mariner Fan

December

Location: Washington, IA
Photo by: Maude

All Aboaaarrrddd!

2011-09-14T11:44:00.000-07:00

Viaduct Park, while hunting down some letterboxes. =)

I'm finally doing it--posting about an event I attended. It's like this--I find the going-ons about far-flung events interesting, and I've always liked the idea of posting about the ones I attend for everyone to enjoy. Not unlike my Great Adventures, really, except these aren't quite so ambitious in nature. Not for me, at least! =)

But then I never seem to get around to posting about them. Oh, there are features on AQ I can work on instead. There's always the catching up on e-mail and posts that seems like a never-ending battle.

But today.... TODAY! I will post about All Aboaaarrrddd! The Letterboxing Express!

It started like this.... many moons ago, I saw the word "train" and I thought, "Yeah, I have to do that." You see, I love trains. =) So I immediately signed up for the event in Ohio. I signed up under an alias because, why not? What if I couldn't make it after all? What if flights were full? What if, what if, what if...? Nobody really had to know we planned to attend.

Amanda and I left Seattle Thursday night, arriving in Cleveland the next morning. We couldn't check into our motel until 3:00, so we spent the morning and early afternoon letterboxing.

Butterfly in Viaduct Park

That evening, we headed to the Spaghetti Warehouse for the Evening Before the All Aboard Event--an event I managed to overlook but fortunately Amanda caught. =) Safari Man organized this particular gathering at the last minute.

We ate, we laughed, and ate some more, then laughed a little more--not necessarily in that order. =) We got exchanges "out of the way"--saying that like it was a chore, but it really wasn't. Tomorrow there would be a lot more people, almost none of which I've ever met, and I knew I'd be plenty busy exchanging. Knocking some of that out early seemed like the prudent thing to do. Our secret arrival was no longer a secret--so I thought. The Big Event wasn't until the next morning and I figured someone would have posted about our attendance on the Ohio message board, but surprisingly, nobody did. I wasn't even trying to keep the secret anymore, but the Ohio board was suspiciously quiet. (Lesson #1: Never trust a suspiciously quiet board--especially if it already has about 25,000 posts!)

Then, the next morning, was the Big Event. Amanda and I pulled up to the train station early and was impressed with the steam engine chugging along the tracks. A steam engine! I didn't realize we'd be riding in a steam engine! Way cool! Then the train left without us and a regular train arrived. Nope, the steam engine wasn't our train. That's okay, though. From inside the train, you can't even see the engine anyhow. Really, to appreciate the beauty of a steam engine, you have to be outside of it. =)

The Spaghetti Warehouse gathering

The hosts, Anne Bonny and Paisley Pineapple, were as surprised at our sudden appearance as the other attendees. Paisley Pineapple wasn't surprised this morning since I had seen her the night before at the Spaghetti Warehouse, but apparently she kept my arrival a secret from her co-host, tormenting her with rumors about a "you'll never believe who's here!" but not elaborating further

I have to admit, I enjoyed surprising Anne Bonny. I've seen her in the AQ chat rooms countless times over a period of the months--the last time was just a few days before--and she was going on about the event and all of the time and effort she put into planning it, and how excited she was about it. And the whole time, I quietly listened, never hinting that I had signed up for the event and would be meeting her face-to-face in just a few days. And more than once, I caught her looking at me, shaking her head in wonder. Or maybe dismay. It's hard to tell sometimes. =)

This is the steam train we thought we'd be getting on.....

This is the train we actually got on....

Then it was time to board the train where the stamping frenzy continued.

The Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad would run right through the heart of Cuyahoga Valley National Park, following along the Cuyahoga River which is most famous for catching on fire in 1969. It also caught fire in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, 1948, and 1952--but it was the fire on June 22, 1969 that grabbed the nation's attention. Time magazine wrote that August about the Cuyahoga River:

The Cuyahoga River... on fire!
Some River! Chocolate-brown, oily, bubbling with subsurface gases, it oozes rather than flows. "Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown," Cleveland's citizens joke grimly. "He decays". . . The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration dryly notes: "The lower Cuyahoga has no visible signs of life, not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes." It is also -- literally -- a fire hazard.

The river today is quite scenic and while I may not be willing to drink out of it without treating the water, at least it looks good! It's hard to imagine how bad the river had become and the transformation it's undergone over the years.

But when you see what happens when you
dip your hand into the river, it's not really all
that surprising that it can catch on fire.

The train stopped in the town of Peninsula, a cute little town bursting with letterboxes. I completely forgot to bring any rain gear at all, and it was raining enthusiastically when we first arrived, so Amanda and I wandered around a bit looking for somewhere to buy ponchos or cheap umbrellas. We found ponchos in a small store and Paisley Pineapple loaned us her umbrella, so we were set. Amanda immediately went in search of all of the bookstores in the area. =)

We ended up only finding one letterbox--mostly because we found a "suspicious pile of people" at one business and joined in on the stamping frenzy--on our way to the bookstore.

Afterwards, we stopped at the Winking Lizard for lunch, dining with 2-2 wheelers. Then it was back to the train for the rest of our ride. =)

Anne Bonny and Paisley Pineapple check in
jeeves for the event.

The cooties came out in force by now, and even the train conductor was not spared. Who got pictures of that? I know some people claimed to have photos of that, but I didn't get one. I did, however, cootie a baby, and it was so easy and fun, I did it a second time. Not long thereafter, the phrase "as easy as cootieing a baby" came into being. =)

The most fun of the whole trip, however, wasn't cootieing a baby. Nope, it was watching Amanda plant a series of virtual cooties on letterboxers passing through the train. She'd lightly tug the back of their shirts and jackets so the person would assume they had been cootied. They'd feel all over their back for the imaginary cootie, try to pull their shirt around to see it, and in one case, flip the bottom of their jacket over their head in an attempt to get rid of the imaginary cootie. They'd wonder around the train asking other letterboxers to please remove the cootie from their back, and would grow increasingly frustrated when they were told that there was none. I don't think our laughing helped--that seemed to make them certain that there was really a cootie involved (why else would we be laughing?) and the search for the elusive cootie would continue. Perhaps it's not funny if this sort of thing happens to you, but wow, it was hilarious to watch. (And as a side note, I do not ever recommend turning your backs on Mn8X either.... They seemed rather inspired by this idea.)

When I boarded the train, I turned around
and took this photo of everyone
behind me. Quite the crowd!

As all good things must come to an end, so did our train ride. Amanda and I headed off to find some more letterboxes before retiring for the evening.

The next day was for ourselves. We letterboxed, we went to visit the home of President James A. Garfield, during which a Civil War encampment was taking place, then moseyed closer to Cleveland to visit his grave. Garfield is Amanda's new favorite president because he once gave a commencement speech on the wonders of leisure and preferred to read books rather than attend meetings and other important things presidents are supposed to do. =)

Then it was back to the airport, where we took a dizzying series of flights from Cleveland to Charlotte to Philly and finally back to Seattle to take a vacation from our vacation. Well, I did. Amanda almost immediately had to fly back to Philly again to work.

Never a day's rest in this household. =)

Thanks to all of you who made us feel so welcome, and special thanks to Anne Bonny and Paisley Pineapple for creating this event!

The Cuyahoga River today looks a bit muddy, but I don't think it'll catch on fire anymore!

Scenes from a passing train....

We didn't get off at this stop, but the train did stop for some
people to get on and off the train.

It's as easy as cootieing a baby....

Union soldiers drill for battle at Garfield's home.

The home of President James A. Garfield. He ran using the "front porch campaign" by
giving his speeches from his front porch--the first president to do so.

Garfield's mausoleum is about as big as his house! Unfortunately,
it was actually closed when we arrived, so we weren't able to go in. =(

John D. Rockefeller is also buried in the same cemetery.

There are over 104,000 graves at this cemetery, and would you believe it--
someone had to go to the exact grave by which we were
looking for a letterbox. Come on--the guy died in 1905! "Quick, Amanda,
take some pictures!" (We came back later and couldn't find it--we
suspect it's probably missing.)

Calendar Photos. ASAP!

2011-09-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

Yiker intends to put up some stiff resistance to
reclaim Miss May this year too! There are also
a few sunflower pictures already submitted, and
she's right--they DO make me smile! =)

Schools are starting. The temperature is getting a bit chillier out there. Summer is coming to an end, and that means.... yes, another letterboxing calendar is in the works!

There are a lot of great submissions so far this year--we've got starfish and snowmen, swamps and sunsets, bears and berries, fungus and flowers, ducks and daisy..... Pictures from Alaska (and lordy, there are a lot of those this year!) to Australia. Even without any new photo submissions, I think we've got the makings for a great letterboxing calendar. But if you've been procrastinating with your submissions, time is running short! Get your photos in soon!

Calendar Menu
Submit Photos
View Your Submissions

Get your submissions in by the end of day on Monday, September 5th, to make it into the 7th annual letterboxing calendar! A free calendar for everyone whose photos I use!

Showing Your Support

2011-08-30T01:34:00.000-07:00

The Html Validator extension in action!

I upgraded Firefox this evening to version 6.0. Why, oh, why is there another version of Firefox? But I digress... this isn't a post about Firefox, but rather a Firefox extension that I use: Html Validator. I like my web pages to validate--I can't count the number of bugs that extension has found for me. Most of them probably aren't a big deal since browsers are designed specifically to "fix" bad HTML and CSS as best they can. Forget a closing tag? No problem--the browser will put it in for you. And most of the time, it does a pretty good job of it, which is why you might not even notice the problem.

But still, it's a problem, because the browser might not get things right. Or maybe most browsers get it right, but that one browser, in one particular version, with a certain setting could crash and burn. So I like my code to validate--both the HTML and CSS files, and the Html Validator is wonderful because it automatically validates all of the HTML and CSS for every single webpage I view. Most websites fail miserably, but AQ pages usually pass with flying colors. =) You'll find some pages that don't validate properly--often times because I'm importing code from other places like the Google AdSense ads found on the tutorial pages. My code validates, but Google's code doesn't. *shrug* Presumably, Google spends a great deal of effort making sure their pages look exactly like they want on every browser known to man, so I generally don't worry about it. I just worry about my own code. =)

With the Firefox upgrade, I also got a message that I needed to upgrade the Html Validator extension, which I did, and when Firefox started up, it loaded Html Validator for Firefox and Mozilla.

I've seen this page before--often times, when I upgrade Firefox, I'll wind up with half a dozen "this extension has been installed!" type of pages opening up, and I usually close them all without reading them.

For whatever reason, though, I read some of it this time wondering if there was anything interesting in it and saw this line: Do you like this extension?

Well, yes, I do. It's helped me find hundreds of bugs on AQ over the years. I can't imagine developing a website without it in the background, constantly validating the code I write.

Then he wrote: I wrote this extension during my very limited freetime, which conflicts with my family life. If you would like to donate to encourage my continuing maintenance and improvement of the extension, you can do it using the Paypal. If you can't, I really appreciate bug fixes, bug reports, translations and improvement suggestions and requests :-)

And I felt sympathetic. Why does he continue to develop and maintain this extension? For the joy of it? The satisfaction of making the world just a little bit better for people like me?

I have no idea who this Marc fellow is. I don't know where he lives, or how big his family is. I don't know how much time or effort he really requires to develop this extension. But I suddenly felt like I could relate to this person. Atlas Quest is largely a free product and my livelihood is dependent on people who enjoy my little creation and support my efforts to maintain and improve it. While it's true that there are some perks for being a premium member, there's absolutely nothing tangible that goes with it, and it's quite easy to have a long and fruitful letterboxing career without ever becoming one.

In a sense, though, this guy has it even harder than I do. He doesn't even pretend to offer any perks for donations. If this fellow started charging people to use his product, though, I'd buy it. I wouldn't spend a lot for it, but I'd probably be willing to spend up to $10 or $15 before I'd start looking around for other options. Which isn't much, but according to the add-on page, he has 145,672 people who've installed his extension. Several of them are me--I have it installed on my home computer, my laptop, and three separate times on my little portable drive for each version of Firefox I have installed on it. Not to mention that I've also installed it on my mom's computer for when I'm working there. =)

BUT STILL..... 145,672 is a lot of people. More than use AQ, that's for sure. If every one of them was willing to pay him $10, he'd probably be quite comfortable financially speaking. Since the product is absolutely free, I'd be surprised if more than 1% of those people actually gave him anything, though.

Anyhow, I love this extension and decided that it was time for me to donate a few bucks to perhaps make it worthwhile for him to continue developing and maintaining the extension. I followed the PayPal link with the intention of donating $10. Not much in the grand scheme of things--I won't miss $10--but I hope it helps him. =)

Wassa Jr. is Canadian. A real international community
here on Atlas Quest! =)

Before I even typed in that amount, however, I had a hunch that Marc was not from the United States. In fact, I immediately wondered if English was even his first language, because the default amount listed was "0,00". I don't know about you, but I've always used periods to separate the dollars from the cents, not a comma. I'm not sure which countries use commas, but I do know that's how they write numbers in Spanish--where we use commas, they use periods, and where we use periods, they use commas. It's kind of annoying for me. I never got used to seeing numbers like that when I lived in Central America.

So then I started wondering what denomination this currency was expected. Hmm.... If I had to make a wild guess--which I was, because I saw nothing about what currency was expected--I'd figure it was somewhere in Europe and that the euro would be a good choice. How much would $10 be in euros? Not sure... five, maybe? Well, let's try 5 and see what happens....

The confirmation page said that would send five euros (woo-who! I guessed right!), and would deduct $7.45 from my account. Yeah, sure, go for it. Maybe I can't take him out for lunch, but at least I can buy him one. =) And maybe I'll send him another 5 euros next year--after the value of the euro crashes because Greece defaults on their debt, so the cost to buy another 5 euros will be less. =)

On the "pay with a credit card" page, the default country listed is Belgium, which makes me think Marc lives in Belgium.

And how cool is that? Here I am, sitting at home in Seattle, a huge fan of a product created by a guy in Belgium in his spare time, building a website that's used by folks from around the world (hello, New Zealanders!) supporting his efforts through PayPal which can automatically convert my dollars into his euros in our interconnected global marketplace practically instantly (presumably after it was converted from New Zealand dollars or Canadian dollars or any other number of currencies before it was sent to me). It's really quite amazing, isn't it?

Anyhow, it got me thinking about a lot of the products I use without giving much thought to the people who created them. I don't know if Marc makes much money doing this, but I hope it's enough to make it worth his while. It's important to support those products you like and use--it doesn't take much to make a difference.

Adding and Editing Locations

2011-07-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

Exhibit A: When you first go to add a location to a box,
you'll see a page like this one.

I've been meaning to post about this ever since that Big Update, but I kept making tweaks and changes and didn't want to post a long explanation then have the information change a few days later. It seems stable enough now, however, and I don't expect any significant changes in the near future anymore. So, at long last, here's a little information about adding and editing locations.

First, I'd like to note that these instructions apply anywhere you can add or edit locations, whether it's letterbox locations, event locations, virtual locations. Whether it's a custom location for yourself that can override the owner's listed location or whether you're listing the locations that others will see--all of this revolves around the same core piece of code, so they all work identically. Since the vast majority of locations are associated with letterboxes, however, I'll refer to those. Just know that this information applies to events and virtuals as well.

Now, let's take a look at Exhibit A. That's the kind of page you'll see when you first have to enter a location. Ours is empty since we have yet to add any location information, but we'll fix that. The important thing to remember about this page is that it's the geocoder page. A geocoder, to refresh your memory, is a system that converts an address or other human-readable location into latitude and longitude coordinates. Anything you type in here will be run through one or more geocoders in an attempt to figure out precisely where your location is.

Exhibit B: Let the geocoder chew on Seattle, WA.

Also note the small question mark in the blue circle next to the word 'Location.' Whenever you see that icon, clicking on it will take you a relevant entry in the help pages of Atlas Quest. If you're not sure about something, that's always a good thing to check.

So let's type in a location. Because I live in Seattle, we'll use that, and I type in "seattle, wa" because I'm too lazy to capitalize properly. =)

When I click 'Store', the text is sent to one or more geocoders, and it returns the following results:

Exhibit C: The geocoder results.

Now this is pretty darned cool! (At least I think so!) The geocoder found one result that it believes matches your location--a town called Seattle, located in King County, in Washington state, which is located in the United States, and even plots a map marking the location so you can verify it's latitude and longitude coordinates.

This is the best case scenario. It's exactly what we wanted, and we can click the 'Next Page' button and continue adding details about our box.

Unfortunately, the results aren't always this clean. Sometimes, the geocoders might find more than one location that appears to match your location. For instance, if we try searching for the location named "Portland", we'll get these results:

Exhibit D: Wow, there certainly are a lot of Portlands out there!

The geocoder returned seven possible matches! This isn't even the complete list of Portlands--these are just the ones that the geocoder thinks are the most likely ones that you are referring to, sorted roughly in order of size from largest to smallest under the assumption that you probably are referring to one of the largest Portlands.

In this case, Portland, Oregon, gets first billing, and Portland, Maine, gets the second billing. Those two are also the two that most people can name right off the top of their heads, so it's nice to see that the geocoder gave those two the two top slots.

The numbers in the list correspond with the numbered markers on the map, so we can easily see their relative locations. Assuming we wanted to use the Portland in Maine, we can get there either by adding Maine to the text box to narrow down the result, or by clicking the second item in the list. I click the second item on the list then "Store," and wind up with this view:

Exhibit E: Portland, Maine--there you are!

This is great--we're right where we want to be and it's time to move on to the next page of listing our letterboxing.

That was mostly a contrived example--I knew that there were a lot of Portlands and could force that "error" to happen. Here's a real example that I fell into purely by accident:

Exhibit F: A real-life scenario of multiple matches when I tried entering a location for "cerro san luis, san luis obispo, ca."

When I tried this search, the geocoders came back with three possible matches, all of which are located in the city of San Luis Obispo. Looking at the map, I can clearly tell that the one I was looking for--a prominent and popular mountain in town to hike up--is the #2 option. My search was for "Cerro San Luis," but the official name of the mountain is Cerro San Luis Obispo. My bad--I typed it in wrong. We do that a lot around here--shorten San Luis Obispo to San Luis. The geocoder also found an apartment complex on the Cal Poly campus named Cerro San Luis, though, as well as a street in town named San Luis Drive. I wanted the mountain, however, so clicked on the second option and continued with the listing. All is well! =)

When Geocoders Fail

The worst situation is when the geocoders can't figure out your location at all. Take a look below at Exhibit G.

Exhibit G: The geocoder failed to find our location

In this case, I tried entering a location for "madonna mountain, san luis obispo, ca." The geocoder, however, was unable to find this. There's a good reason that the geocoder can't find this location--officially, it doesn't exist. Madonna Mountain is a name that many locals use to refer to Cerro San Luis Obispo. In fact, most people call it Madonna Mountain. There's a giant M on the mountain (which many people assume is for Madonna, but it's actually short for Mission), and the mountain has been owned by the Madonna family for decades and decades. (No relation to the pop singer.) SLO is famous for the world-famous Madonna Inn, along Madonna Road, right next to the Madonna Inn, and with a giant M on the mountain, it's understandable that people would tend to call it Madonna Mountain. BUT--officially--that's not the name. (After the owner, Alex Madonna, died a few years ago, there was talk about making that name official, but so far, nothing has come from it.)

The only time you usually see Cerro San Luis Obispo (or Cerro San Luis) used is in newspapers and other media that like to be officially correct in such matters.

But long story short, the geocoders were unable to figure out where Madonna Mountain was located because it officially doesn't exist. AQ was able to match the city where you said the mountain was located, and it gives you that as an option, but if you want to pin-point the location better than that, you have two choices:

Use the official name of Cerro San Luis Obispo (assuming you knew that to begin with, though, why didn't you just use that as the location?)
Create a custom location

We already reviewed how to add Cerro San Luis Obispo as a location, so let's add Madonna Mountain as a custom location this time. =)

Adding Custom Locations

To get out from under the geocoders, which clearly have no idea what Madonna Mountain is, click that "Edit Custom Location" link at the bottom of the list. That's your 'escape hatch' from the geocoders. I click it, which takes us to Exhibit H:

Exhibit H: We've escaped the geocoders into the Custom Location page

The custom location has already been pre-filled with information from Exhibit G. In this case, it's information about the city of San Luis Obispo. A lot of the information will be the same for Madonna Mountain because it's in the city, but we do have to tweak this information specifically for Madonna Mountain.

Most of this page is self-explanatory. The name of the location we want to add is "Madonna Mountain," so we enter that as the "Park Name, Business Name, Etc." section. I don't have an address for that mountain, so I'll leave that blank. (If you know the address for the trailhead, however, it might be a good thing to include.) The city, county, state, and country area already correct, so I'll leave them be.

The coordinates are pretty straight-forward. The peak of Madonna Mountain, which I can look up from Google Maps, is at 35.282741024156, -120.68038151502. (If you have a GPS, you could also have recorded this information when you planted the letterbox.)

Then there's the radius. This is entirely new since the update. AQ now tracks the relative sizes of a given location. A park is usually much smaller than a city, and a city is usually much smaller than a state, and a state is usually much smaller than a country, and now AQ knows this! Which is very useful information for providing accurate search results.

There's a lot of information about the radius if you click the 'help' link for radius, but in a nutshell, it's the distance from the center point of your location to the outer edge of your location, as the crow flies. Assuming your preferences are set to use miles, the distance is in miles. (If your preferences are set for kilometers, you'll have to enter kilometers instead.) The only way to figure this out is to pull out a map--real or online--and measure the distance. For Madonna Mountain, the radius is 0.681 miles.

Exhibit I: Adding a custom location

When I'm done, I click 'Store', and AQ takes me back to the geocoder page, displaying my custom location:

Exhibit J: Madonna Mountain, our custom location, now supported by the geocoders.

And we're on our merry way again.

Adding a custom location can be a bit of a pain--figuring out the coordinates and radius and all that--and if you can make a location work without it, it'll save you a lot of extra effort.

And that's it for now. There's a lot more I want to talk about on that custom location page, but I'll save that for another day.....

Newest Traditional Boxes Widget

2011-07-19T12:10:00.000-07:00

I took a break from fixing bugs from the Big Update--the worst of the bugs seem to have been fixed, but there are still a few issues I'm working out. So anyhow, I felt like taking a break from that part of AQ and decided to work on something a bit less ambitious.

You might have noticed that the Big Update tweaked the newest traditional letterboxes widget a bit--the full address of the locations started displaying rather than just the city. This was actually accidental. The update pretty much affected everything that touched traditional boxes. Anywhere and everywhere, if you saw the name of a letterbox someone listed on Atlas Quest, that code would have broke without any modifications, and the widgets were no exception. I fixed this particular widget, after doing a global search for a key function that I used to display locations, and replaced it with the new function call. In this case, however, I thoughtlessly typed the new function as "Display" instead of "DisplayCity." The difference being that the Display() function displays the full address of a location with the DisplayCity() function only displays the city portion of the address. It's a minor bug, as far as bugs go, and I rather liked it since it let me see what people trying as locations and spotting possible bugs in the listing of boxes, so I didn't fix it.

Wassa noticed that and suggested making that an option in the preferences and I thought, "Yeah, I can do that." So I did. =)

And while I was at it, I also added the option to specify a location that the widget will return new box listings for. Would you prefer the widget only show all newly listed letterboxes in Oregon? Done! Would you prefer to see all newly listed boxes within 50 miles of Seattle? Done! What about all newly listed letterboxes along I-5 between Sacramento and Portland? Done! That last one is pretty cool, don't you think? =) Any search that works on the Advanced Search page will work here as well. I doubt most people would have a need for a list of new boxes along a particular route, but the option is there. That's part of the flexibility this update provided--in the code, I just tell AQ to display and process a "location," and it can process any type of location. That box works exact the same, whether it's on the Advanced Search page or the newest boxes widget or from an app or anywhere!

Cool stuff. *nodding*

So go ahead and update your newest traditional boxes widget to suit your preferences. =)

Happy trails!

World Travelers!

2011-07-17T11:47:00.000-07:00

I'm still making some tweaks and updates to the geocoders and fixing things that I broke with this big update--yes, there are still outstanding issues that need my attention!--however, the seriousness of them seems to be subsiding. Progress is progress--I'll take it! =)

So I'm still not quite ready to blog about the tip, tricks, and traps to avoid in listing locations with your letterboxes, but it seems a lot of you are figuring it out already.

This morning, I pulled up a map of the most recently listed letterboxes on Atlas Quest. I was actually testing for a certain problem that was reported to me and any search results would have worked for my purposes, but there was that handy, fat little Map Newest Letterboxes button so I made use of it--and was a little surprised to see letterboxes all over the world! Yes, I know, people plant letterboxes all over the world, but usually when I look at that map, I see a bunch of letterboxes listed in the United States and maybe--sometimes--there might be one in Europe or New Zealand or something off the beaten path.

Since the list of newest boxes is always changing, I did a screen shot of the map I saw so you can see what I mean:

Look at that--there are boxes in the United Kingdom, a few in Western Europe, one in the Carribean, one "floating" off the coast of Africa, one in Thailand, a bunch in Alaska, and G--from this point of view--appears to be the Lost City of Atlantis. =)

The Alaska ones, in hindsight, make a lot of sense. There was a letterbox cruise to Alaska recently, and it appears they've been busy listing their letterboxing! That green marker labeled "M" I knew immediately were mystery boxes located "somewhere in the world." World-wide mysteries are mapped to the coordinates at 0, 0, and "M" is at 0, 0. Being a green marker, as I discussed yesterday, floating in the middle of water was nothing unusual and most likely, those mystery boxes are really located in the United States somewhere.

But still, it seemed like an unusual number of boxes are located outside of the United States, and I started worrying if there was a problem with the geocoders putting boxes in the wrong locations, so I took a closer look at the others.

And they're totally legit! Even that blue one mysterious floating in the middle in the Indian Ocean. If you zoomed in close enough, you'd see that it marked the location of a small island that's a part of the British Indian Ocean Territory. Those in Western Europe really are located in Spain, Morocco, and Scotland. The box listed as being in Thailand really is in Vietnam--the map is actually correct, but we're zoomed out so far that Vietnam doesn't show up as a separate country in this view. If you zoomed in, though, it would accurately show the marker in Vietnam. And that marker in the Caribbean Sea--it's hard to tell which island its on from such a zoomed-out view, but when I zoomed in, I could see it was Puerto Rico.

Totally cool!

I also scrolled through the list to note all of the green markers--the green markers, if you remember from yesterday, mean that the location of the box could be "more than 30 miles away" from that specific point. Locations such as a "world-wide mystery," that's to be expected. =) So while a green marker doesn't mean something is wrong, I don't really expect there to be a lot of them either. Most boxes aren't mysteries, after all. There aren't a lot of green markers, but I figured it didn't hurt for me to scroll through the list and double-check that they really are mysteries and therefore should be green.

A mystery box in Maine--check! "The Adirondacks"--check! And oooh..... that's an interesting one, isn't it? Not a state, but the Adirondacks covers a pretty large area that's probably larger than some states. That's the kind of mystery box that the old version of AQ wouldn't have been able to handle gracefully. And a mystery box in West Virginia. Check! And a box in Juneau, Alaska. Hmm.... Mystery boxes "somewhere in a city" usually should have a red marker, not a green one. I better check that one....

A little Google-sleuthing shows the "City and Borough" of Juneau has an area covering 3,255.0 square miles--that's huge! That fills a circle with a radius of 70 miles--considerably greater than the 30-mile threshold for a green marker. But intuitively, a 70-miles wide circle around Juneau didn't feel right. That must include the entire borough, but what about the city. I ran the location through a couple different geocoders, all of which returned something close to 70 miles as a radius, except one that returned 36 miles. Not sure where that geocoder pulled that number from, but I liked it, and changed the radius to 36 miles. =) Which is still large enough to justify the green marker, but at least it will show up in a location-based search that defaults to 50 miles while the old radius did not.

Yep, they were all supposed to be green markers.
Totally awesome! *nodding* =)

Nothing new to report today, though. Not yet....

The Magic of Geocoders....

2011-07-16T05:00:00.000-07:00

Wassa might start fires *cough*LbCon*cough*, but Wassa Jr likes
to help Smokey the Bear prevent forest fires. =)

I was going to spend today explaining the ins and outs of listing a location with your box, but I'm still making tweaks to that code and don't really want to put anything in writing that might change. Maybe by tomorrow I'll be ready for that ball of ear wax. =)

So today will be an easy lesson on geocoders. I've mentioned them in past posts, but I haven't really delved into detail about what they can do that they weren't able to do before this update.

A geocoder, as a reminder, is a system that can convert a human-readable address such as "Lincoln Park, Seattle, WA" into latitude and longitude coordinates that Atlas Quest can use to calculate distances and map locations.

In the "old days" (i.e. a week ago), there was one geocoder. It was the geocoder provided our friends at Google. It wasn't perfect (no geocoder is perfect), but it was leaps better than nothing at all, which is what AQ had been using before the Google geocoder came along.

When I started working on the custom location feature, I discovered the the geocoder AQ had been using was depreciated and replace with a new (and presumably better) geocoder. I needed to upgrade, and the code was not particularly well suited for upgrading the geocoder. I imagined the geocoder as something like a lego piece, and I could snap off the old geocoder and snap on a new geocoder that would fit perfectly into the newly opened space where the old geocoder used to rest.

But it wouldn't be that easy. No, it was going to get messy, but it really shouldn't have been messy had I designed it better. It should work like interchangeable lego pieces.

So, I needed a replacement for the geocoder, and I started looking around. The replacement geocoder from Google I took a look at, and the results frightened me. It looked mean and ugly. So I took a look at the Yahoo geocoder, and with a little poking and prodding, I thought, "Wow, this is cool!" I started working on a Yahoo geocoder, which also returned the radius of a location--a new piece of data AQ never had access to before and I ended up using extensively during the rewrite of the search engine.

The Yahoo geocoder could do some things the old Google geocoder could not--for instance, airport codes. Type in SBP (the airport code for our little local airport in San Luis Obispo), and by golly, it finds that airport and returns all of the relevant entries. Not that it would be used very often, but still, it's nice when you realize there's more functionality than before.

More useful, perhaps, was that it could geocode locations in a huge list of foreign countries--here's a list I've copied from their documentation:

North and South America:

BAHAMAS, THE
BRAZIL
CANADA
CAYMAN ISLANDS
FRENCH GUIANA
GUADALOUPE
MARTINIQUE
MEXICO
SAINT BARTHELEMY
USA (including PUERTO RICO and US VIRGIN ISLANDS)

Europe:

ALBANIA
ANDORRA
AUSTRIA
BELARUS
BELGIUM
BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
BULGARIA
CROATIA
CZECH REPUBLIC
DENMARK
ESTONIA
FINLAND
FRANCE
GERMANY
GIBRALTAR
GREECE
HUNGARY
ICELAND
IRELAND
ITALY
LATVIA
LIECHTENSTEIN
LITHUANIA
LUXEMBOURG
MACEDONIA
MOLDOVA
MONACO
MONTENEGRO
NETHERLANDS
NORWAY
POLAND
PORTUGAL
ROMANIA
RUSSIA
SAN MARINO
SERBIA
SLOVAKIA
SLOVENIA
SPAIN
SWEDEN
SWITZERLAND
TURKEY
UKRAINE
UNITED KINGDOM (including ISLE of MAN and CHANNEL ISLANDS)
VATICAN CITY

Asia:

HONG KONG-CHINA
INDIA
INDONESIA
MACAU-CHINA
SINGAPORE
TAIWAN
THAILAND

Middle-East and Africa:

BAHRAIN
BOTSWANA
EGYPT
JORDAN
KENYA
KUWAIT
LEBANON
LESOTHO
MOROCCO
MOZAMBIQUE
NAMIBIA
NIGERIA
OMAN
QATAR
REUNION
SAUDI ARABIA
SOUTH AFRICA
SWAZILAND
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Holy jumping junipers! That's an awfully big list! (Clearly written by a developer, I might add--a professional writer would have never used all caps in creating such a list!) Not that Liechtenstein and Mozazmbique are letterboxing hotbeds of activity, but still, it's nice to know that the geocoder can figure out such locations!

I developed a little block of code that used the Yahoo geocoder, got it working, and all was well. I really wanted that "lego-like" snap-in kind of functionality, though, and I figured the best way to do that was to create another geocoder and try snapping it in. I went back and implemented Google's new geocoder, finally getting that to work--and with just a single line of code that was changed, I could switch between the two geocoders practically on the fly. And then I had another idea... why not chain them together into another "super" geocoder?

In the end, this super-geocoder will attempt to pull in information from three different sources in an attempt to understand your location. Park names that never worked before suddenly were now supported. The Yahoo geocoder supported airport codes, but the Google geocoder did not. The Google geocoder could figure out street intersections, but the Yahoo geocoder didn't seem to be able to do that. Ying and yang. For best results, I needed both.

As it stands now, when you type in a location that AQ need to convert into latitude and longitude coordinates, it runs the information through up to five distinctly different geocoders:

The first geocoder really isn't a "geocoder" in the traditional sense. It takes what you typed in and tries to figure out if you're typing in the coordinates directly, so you can run a search for "34.6, 121.6" and have it return boxes near that point.
AQ gets the first shot at figuring out what you are trying to say. It'll search it's own database looking for information matching what you typed in, and if it finds it, that's what gets returned.
If AQ doesn't find a suitable match, Yahoo gets the next crack at figuring out your request. If a suitable match is found, awesome--that's what AQ will use.
When the Yahoo geocoder fails, then the Google geocoder gets a crack at the information. If you ever run a search for a street intersection, it'll almost certainly reach this geocoder. AQ knows only a tiny number of street intersections that people have used for their box locations and Yahoo doesn't seem to handle intersections at all. If a suitable match is found--awesome, AQ runs with it.
And finally, if all else fails, there's another source of data I found with 1.86 million "points of interest" in the United States. I found it a little scary some of the small parks I searched for that this source of information could find. Had I bet money, I'd have lost. This data is actually hosted by AQ--the data was in an enormous file and wasn't provided as an API by another company. (I basically had to create the API to use this data--a geocoder that was able to search this file.)

Each of the geocoders has their strengths and weaknesses, but collectively, it's a pretty amazing little beast. If you had trouble listing a certain park as a location in the past, it might work just fine now. The new geocoders, I noticed, also had better support for geographical features, so you can even list boxes as being on specific mountains or by a lake. They also often support more "vague" locations such as "Pacific Northwest" and "Central Coast of California"--perhaps useful for listing mystery boxes in those locations, though admittedly less so for running a search.

I also updated the ability to process coordinates. You can type in a location such as "34.6, 121.6" to run a location-based search centered on that point on the Earth, but AQ is better about processing other formats for the coordinates. It used to be required that you used the latitude, a space, then the longitude. And heaven forbid, don't even THINK about putting the comma between the two! AQ, in the past, was a very temperamental beast.=)

The new "coordinate geocoder" will allow commas now. In fact, you can type in a wide variety of formats that will properly be understood including:

50.3 -120.5
50.3, -120.5
-120.5 50.3
50.3N 120.5W
120.5 W 50.3 N
50 18 0 -120 30 0
50 18 0N 120 30 0 W
50° 18' 0" N 120° 30' 0" W

Ironically, I copied these examples from the "reverse geocoder" directions from the Yahoo geocoder which will convert coordinates into an address. I don't use Yahoo's reverse geocoder, though--I just want to figure out if a person is trying to type in coordinates and understand what they typed in--I don't need to attach an address to it. But all of these examples work with AQ now. I didn't know where these example coordinates went to, but I copied them into AQ to test they really did work, and was pleased to see that they found boxes at Manning Park, Canada! Which is a small park that most people never would have even heard of.... except that it's also the end of the Pacific Crest Trail! Makes me wonder if the person who wrote that documentation on Yahoo's website might have been a former thru-hiker? =)

Before the update went live, I had to run every single location for every single letterbox and event through the new geocoders. Old locations did have have information about the radius of the location, all US locations had no information about the county of the location, and all mystery boxes had no latitude and longitude coordinates associated with them, and for this upgrade, I needed to fill in those blanks. So every single location was run through the geocoder--a process that took the better part of a month--and which is why you might have noticed that the location you had listed for some boxes might have shifted a bit. Most of the issues I found involved the "free-flowing" nature allowed for mystery boxes, so if there's a problem with how one of your boxes got geocoded, the mystery boxes would be the first ones you should check. I tried to fix problematic "updates" manually, but with over 100,000 boxes listed on AQ, manually checking every single one wasn't possible. I wrote a bunch of code for me to help identify "possible problems"--such as a new location that ends up being 6,123 miles away from the coordinates of the old location or a location with a radius of 1000 miles (not many places span such a wide area, but they do exist!). Subtler problems, however, could have slipped through, so it wouldn't hurt to run through your plants and check that the locations are what you think they should be.

So that's the skinny on using the new geocoder. It's bigger, it's better, and badder (in a good way) than ever! =) However, I'll note, there's no such thing as a perfect geocoder--you'll still find locations that none of the geocoders can figure out. But with this update, I hope you'll have a much more difficult time finding "unsupported" locations. =) (And, yes, you CAN use commas in coordinates now!)

Mystery Letterboxes

2011-07-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

Please review the emergency instructions
on the brochures in the seat-back pocket
in front of you. You may experience
turbulence, but we'll get you through it!

Believe it or not, I still have more information I'd like to share about the Big Update earlier this week. Today's discussion will focus on mystery letterboxes. I've already talked a little about them in the context of counties, but there is a lot more to them than merely being able to specify a county. =)

If you've run some searches on Atlas Quest, you might have noticed that for the first time, mystery boxes will be included in a location-based search, and that's why you'll always see the "Mystery Boxes" attribute available on the Advanced Search page. Any search you do could possibly return mystery boxes including trip planner searches and location-based searches. So let's run a search for all mystery boxes within 150 miles of Providence, RI.

You might be wondering.... how can AQ possibly calculate the distance to a mystery box--it's a mystery, after all! Rhode Island, as you all might be aware, is a pretty small state. All mystery boxes located "somewhere within Rhode Island" are going to be within 150 miles of Providence because there are no locations still in Rhode Island that are further away than 150 miles. AQ might not know the precise distance of the letterbox, but it knows that all Rhode Island mystery boxes are within 150 miles of Providence. It's impossible for it not to be. =)

Previously, we knew this intuitively, but AQ didn't have the ability to figure this sort of thing out on it's own. This update changes that. Now, every single location AQ knows about has a latitude and longitude coordinate and it has a radius. Rhode Island is listed with a radius of 40.39 miles centered around 41.582584, -71.503414. Obviously, Rhode Island isn't a circle, but these numbers are good enough for an approximation, and when we're talking about mystery boxes, approximations are usually plenty fine. Being approximately correct is better than being precisely wrong. =)

Now, when you run a search for all boxes within 150 miles of Providence, Rhode Island, AQ calculates the distance in two steps. First, it calculates the exact distance--as the crow flies--from the center point of Providence (41.823856, -71.411741) to the center point of the letterbox (41.582584, -71.503414 for Rhode Island mysteries), which comes out to 17.31 miles. So the "average" Rhode Island mystery box is expected to be about 17.31 miles from the city center of Providence. But the thing is, the actual box location could be a lot further away than that. In a worst case scenario, the mystery box might be out the very outer edge if the mystery area, on the other side of the center point for the state: In other words: 17.31 miles + 40.39 miles = 57.7 miles away.

That is--roughly speaking--the worst case scenario for a Rhode Island mystery box if you're in downtown Providence, and that's the distance AQ uses for sorting boxes based on distance. You'd have to run a location-based search that extends at least 58 miles to include Rhode Island mystery boxes, but it will show up.

If you take a look at the results of our search, the first Rhode Island mystery boxes that show up in slot #7 (for me, at least--depending on restrictions, plants, custom locations, etc., your list could be a bit different than mine). Two other types of mystery boxes slip in as being slightly closer to Providence than those that are "somewhere in Rhode Island": county mystery boxes.

A couple of RI boxes are listed as being "somewhere in Providence County" and a few more are listed as being "somewhere in Windham County." Providence is in Providence County, so we know a mystery box in Providence County will be closer than mystery boxes in any other county of Rhode Island, and with an average radius of 16.65 miles, AQ figures that mystery a box "somewhere in Providence County" has a worst-case scenario of 24.9 miles from the center center of Providence.

And similarly, AQ calculation a worst-case scenario of 49.7 miles for mystery boxes in "Windham County." Windham County isn't even in Rhode Island--it's in neighboring Connecticut! But it's nestled right up along the Rhode Island border and the worst-case scenario for having to drive to find a Windham County letterbox is actually about 10 miles less than a worst-case scenario for having to drive to find a "somewhere in Rhode Island" letterbox.

So that's why you'll see Windham County mystery boxes show up before Rhode Island mystery boxes in the search results. In a worst-case scenario, they're probably closer--even if they are in a different state.

When it comes to figuring out the direction a mystery box is located, AQ can't be certain about the Providence County mysteries or the Rhode Island mysteries--we're inside of those locations and the mystery box could be in any direction from the city of Providence. However, the mystery boxes in Windham County, Connecticut--even without knowing precisely where it's located, AQ can tell that's it's "somewhere to the west" of Providence, and faithfully points in the correct direction of the mystery.

It's really pretty neat, and I hope it means more people will start looking for mystery boxes in their neck of the woods as a result. You don't have to do an area search to find mystery boxes--they're all around you, and that now shows up in the location-based searches. The more specific the mystery area is, the more likely you'll see it showing up in a location-based search.

For mystery boxes "somewhere in the United States" (for instance), you're better off just running an area search. AQ has a radius of 3,880.96 miles for the radius of the United States, so a location-based search would have to cast at least a distance of 3881 miles to include those, and tens of thousands of boxes would show up before it. Viewing mystery boxes in location-based searches generally works best if the mystery is a relatively small area such as states in New England or counties.

It's also possible to see mystery boxes show up in trip planner searches, but since a trip planner search is limited to a maximum of 30 miles off of the route being searched, you might not see them show up very often. Take this example of a search for all mystery boxes within 30 miles of I-95 between Key West and Portland, ME. Those county-wide mysteries in Providence County make the cut, along with a couple of mystery boxes in Norfolk County, MA, but that's it. (For the moment!) There might be other mystery boxes along the route, but AQ can't be certain that those other mysteries are within 30 miles of I-95.

If you've been adding custom locations and had to add a location that the geocoders couldn't find, you'll see a space for the "radius" of the location. This is the sort of thing it's used for, and it's very important the the number is approximately correct if you want the box to show up as expected in location-based searches and trip planner searches. You don't need to be exact--and since counties are never perfect circles (so far as I know)--it's impossible to be exact.

In fact, how AQ handles these calculations, it treats mystery boxes exactly like it does for non-mystery boxes. Every location AQ knows about has an associated radius, and it's added to calculated distance to create the distances you see listed in the search results. If you hide a letterbox in a large city park--take New York City's Central Park, for instance--the park has an average radius of 1.68 miles. If you run a search for boxes using Central Park as your search point, all Central Park boxes will show up as being 1.68 miles away. (Radius + calculated distance = final distance, i.e. 1.68 + 0 = 1.68) If you're standing in the center of Central Park, AQ believes those boxes might be up to 1.68 miles away from where you're standing. A box at a rest area with a radius of 0.1 miles--yep--AQ will add 0.1 miles to the calculated distance for that box in the searches.

The point is--whenever you see AQ list the distance, that's essentially a worst-case scenario for how far you'll have to travel to get the box.

On the trip planner, I'll also note, the radius of the location is actually added to the "offpath" distance--not the "mile marker" distance. The offpath column displays the worst-case scenario for how far off path you might have to travel to get the box. There's not really any "worst case mile markers." The box might be located somewhere between "MM10 and MM20" (if the radius of the location is 5 miles), but it's not really practical to list the same box for every MM that it might apply to. So in that case, the MM is based on the center point of the mystery location and the radius is applied to the offpath distance.

Clear as mud? =)

Back to those mystery boxes near Providence. From there, click through to the Map Results link. You'll notice the map is filled with red and green markers. The green ones are new and were added to accommodate all those mystery boxes out there.

The blue icons aren't on this map because we only searched for mystery boxes and the blue icons are used to denote "exact" locations. The red icons represented those boxes where people specified a city for the box but failed to provide an exact address. These boxes typically weren't mysteries, but the accuracy of their locations was always in doubt. And with the additional of genuine mysteries, the coordinates could be a long way off from the actual box location. A mystery box "somewhere in the United States" covers a lot of territory, and I thought it was prudent to be able to identify which boxes might be way off base.

If you've been paying attention so far, you might be wondering, "Yeah, okay, then why are there any red markers at all? All of the boxes in the search are mystery boxes! Shouldn't all of the markers be blue?"

And that's an excellent question. The thing with mystery boxes is that the line that used to identify what counts as a mystery and what does not count as a mystery has grown a little nebulous. Clark County, Georgia, for instance, has a radius of 10.31 miles while the city of Seattle has a radius of 16.59 miles. A box listed as "Clark County, GA" is almost certainly a mystery box, but a box in "Seattle, WA" probably is not--but the confidence level AQ has for the box in Clark County is actually better than it is for the city of Seattle.

It actually gets worse than that in a sense, but it doesn't show up on this particular map. Even a search for just mystery boxes can return a box with an "exact" location. How is that even possible? Because you might have solved the mystery and attached a custom location to the letterbox. Just because you solved the mystery and know where it is doesn't mean the box is no longer considered a mystery box! So if you used a bunch of custom locations, it's entirely possible that AQ will plot an exact location for a mystery letterbox, and use a blue marker as a result.

I haven't solved any of those mystery boxes in Rhode Island, Connecticut, or Massachusetts so AQ doesn't use any blue markers on my map of mystery boxes for the area, but if you have--you'll see them too!

See what a problem adding support for counties caused? Strange paradoxes like these... So now--when you add or edit a letterbox, you can set a "city-wide mystery box" or a "I'm only going to list the city, but this is not a mystery box" option. If you specify a location with a radius that's less than one mile, AQ will not allow it to be a mystery. That's narrowed down so much that for all intents and purposes, it doesn't seem fair to call it a mystery. And if you specify a location that has no name, no address, and no city listed--meaning it's a county-wide (or larger) area, it must be a mystery box and will set the mystery icon. If it's smaller than a county and larger than one mile, however, you'll now have the option to use or not use the mystery box icon on the box.

Don't worry about remembering these details--the only reason I mention all this is to explain part of the reason why AQ's concept of a mystery box is a bit more nebulous than before. Where a non-mystery box ends and a mystery box begins is a fuzzy line.

So when I got to the point where I had to update the map, I considered several options, and finally decided that the color the icon should reflect the relative "confidence level" AQ has about the box being near that specific point. If AQ believes the coordinates are within one mile of the actual box location, it uses a blue marker. If AQ believes that the coordinates are within 30 miles of the actual box location, a red marker. And if AQ believes that the coordinates might be more than 30 miles away from the actual location of the box, it'll use a green marker. The markers plot the exact latitude and longitude coordinates of the specified location, and the color of the marker identifies how close the actual location of the box might be.

So even though every box in my search returned mystery boxes, some mystery boxes are known to be within a 30 miles radius (the county-wide mysteries if the county has a radius of less than 30 miles) and some mystery boxes are outside of that limit (the state-wide mysteries and county-wide mysteries if the county has a radius larger than 30 miles).

Looking at this map AQ generated, it would appear that most counties in Rhode Island and Connecticut are smaller than 30 miles and most counties in Massachusetts are larger than 30 miles in radius.

I should also point out--I got an e-mail from Kirbert who noticed that a search for mystery boxes in Florida plotted a point far out in the Gulf of Mexico as the "center" of Florida, who strangely saw nothing wrong with this--just that it was an interesting observation. =)

And he's right--this is actually normal and perfectly acceptable. Given the unusual shape of Florida's long panhandle and peninsula, the geocoders have figured out that the best single "point" to mark the center of Florida is actually in the Gulf of Mexico. Take a close look at the image I captured--it contains the entire state of Florida, and that green "A" marker is actually near the center of the image. So if you see mystery boxes mapped in watery locales such as this--just remember, that's not where the box is located--that's just the center point of the mystery area where the box can be found. It would, however, be troubling to see a blue marker at this location since a blue marker means that the box would be within one mile of the marker, and there's no land within one mile of the center point for Florida! A green marker? Nooo problem! =)

Like I said before, this update has a lot of new stuff packed into it, and it'll take awhile for me to try to explain it thoroughly and how all of these moving pieces work. =) That's enough for today, though. More tomorrow! =)

Road Trip!!!!!

2011-07-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

Going on a road trip soon? If so, you might appreciate some of the upgrades the Trip Planner got with that Big Update a couple of nights ago. =)

I didn't really want to muck around with the trip planner, but alas, the lengthy tentacles that grew out of custom locations reached out and affected all sorts of subsystems along the way, and those changes effectively thrashed the trip planner to pieces. After all was said and done, the trip planner didn't work. Not even close. It was beyond help--it either needed to be replaced or retired. But the trip planner as we knew it was finished.

Amanda and I held a private ceremony to celebrate its demise--that trip planner had problems and often times I thought the results it returned were almost worse than worthless. I certainly wouldn't miss it, but I knew a lot of people on Atlas Quest would. No, I couldn't retire the trip planner permanently. No, I needed to create a replacement.

Of course, when building a replacement, I put some thought into what I should do differently for Trip Planner 2.0 and fix those pesky issues that plagued Trip Planner 1.0.

The first thing that needed fixing was a no brainer: The distances off-path from the route were highly inaccurate because distances were measured from the city center that the box was in--not the actual location of the letterbox. When I first created the trip planner, way back in 2004, Atlas Quest did not support addresses at all. It supported cities and only cities, and the trip planner was therefore designed to work with cities and only cities. I never upgraded the trip planner to work with addresses when the addressing feature came along.

Now that a complete replacement of the trip planner was necessary, I needed to fix this problem.

I also had another idea for the trip planner which I thought would be useful--a list of how far along the route that the letterboxes were located. If you run a search for all boxes on I-5 between Sacramento and Seattle, it would be nice to know that the next box in the list is 1.3 miles beyond the one you just found. In fact, wouldn't it be cool if, when you left Sacramento, you could reset the trip odometer to 0 and watch the numbers click off right where the boxes would be along the route? I was certain I could implement something to that effect, and by golly, I was going to try.

And finally, due to technical reasons I won't bore you with, there was a very limited number of large cities that the trip planner allowed you to use as starting and ending points along the route. I wanted to fix that so you could search between almost any two locations along a route.

Again, I toiled for weeks, rebuilding the trip planner from scratch. And finally, I finished, and I was immensely pleased with my work. =)

Let's admire it, shall we? Take these search results of all boxes located within 5 miles of I-5 between Sacramento and Seattle. The most obvious change is that the results have a new column: distance. The first box is just 0.2 miles out of Sacramento, and as you scroll down the list, you'll see the distance get larger and larger until you mile marker 730.1 in Seattle. (You'll have to change to the last page of the search results to see the Seattle boxes.)

This, I think, is very cool. Maybe not earth shattering, but still, very cool. =)

Now, if you examine the list closely, you'll notice that a lot of Sacramento boxes aren't in it. In fact, a lot of boxes from all of the large cities that I-5 goes through aren't in it. I mentioned yesterday that the geocoders now return information to me about the size of a location, and in Sacramento's case, it tells AQ that Sacramento has a radius of approximately 11.43 miles. So AQ thinks, "Hmm.... Any box listed as being somewhere in the city of Sacramento might be as far as 11.43 miles off of I-5, and this person only wants to see boxes that are known to be within 5 miles of I-5. Therefore, I better not display these boxes."

Weed, CA, however, is a much smaller town, and the geocoders report that it's only 2.8 miles wide. Therefore, AQ thinks, "Hmmm... Any box listed as being somewhere in the town of Weed is a maximum of 2.8 miles away. I may not know where in Weed this letterbox is located, but it doesn't matter--I know it's less than 5 miles away, so I'll display these boxes."

Additionally, distances are now calculated based on the known address of the location--not simply the city center, so calculated distances will be much more accurate. (Unless, of course, the letterbox has no address listed, at which point it'll use the city center for lack of a better reference point.)

In a nutshell, the distances off path will be much more accurate than ever before. In fact, they're so accurate, you might very well spot inaccuracies in the route.

When I originally created the trip planner, I pulled up maps and plotted the route one city at a time along its entire length. It was tedious and slow, and knowing that distances would only be as accurate as the city center, I took shortcuts. When the road had a series of sharp switchbacks, I plotted a straight line directly through it. If the route I plotted was off the actual route by a mile, no big deal--my shortcuts would be hidden in the calculations for city centers. (This is also why you might notice that Google Maps calculates the distance of I-5 from Sacramento to Seattle as 753 miles while AQ calculates 730 miles--skip a switchback or turn here and there, and it starts to add up!)

Fast forward to today--and now that calculated distances are much more accurate, my shortcuts from before have caught up with me. Discrepancies in the actual distances vs calculated distances will likely be due to my sloppy route plotting. I need to replot every route that AQ supports, but that could take months of effort, and I didn't feel it was necessary to hold up the update for this to be completed. It will happen, eventually, but in the meantime, the calculated distances are much better than before already--my plotted routes rarely went more than a mile away from the actual route while the city-centered calculations were often off by ten miles or more.

So there's still room for improvement in the off-path distances, and the trip planner still needs some work. The code that runs it is fantastic! The data that went into it--not so fantastic, and you should be aware of those limitations.

Now--a little about how to run a trip planner search. On the Simple Search page, it looks much like it did before: You select a route, then the starting point, then the ending point. The options for starting and ending points, however, are much more extensive than before. You'll see all the large cities like before, but a lot of the smaller towns the route travels through. The I-5 corridor has a whopping 97 towns to select from! That's about the only new thing to note there, though.

Running a trip planner search from the Advanced Search page is a bit more of a challenge. You won't find a "trip planner" a search type option anymore--it's all done through that "Location" box. To run a a trip planner search, you type in a location like this:

ALONG i-5 FROM sacramento, ca TO seattle, wa

The words ALONG, FROM, and TO are keywords that help AQ divide the text into pieces it can understand, and you can use pretty much anything as a location. Cities are the most obvious, but you could search from a specific address within a city, or a zip code, or a geographical feature, etc. Also, you don't have to fussy about the order you use the keywords. Equal to the above statement, any of these would also work:

ALONG i-5 TO seattle, wa FROM sacramento, ca

TO seattle, wa FROM sacramento, ca ALONG i-5

TO seattle, wa ALONG i-5 FROM sacramento, ca

FROM sacramento, ca TO seattle, wa ALONG i-5

I'll also mention that the first keyword is actually optional, and the following searches are exactly the same as the four above as far as AQ is concerned:

i-5 TO seattle, wa FROM sacramento, ca

seattle, wa FROM sacramento, ca ALONG i-5

seattle, wa ALONG i-5 FROM sacramento, ca

sacramento, ca TO seattle, wa ALONG i-5

I've put the keywords in all caps just so they stand out, but that's not required. Lowercase keywords work just as well.

Now, let's say you try running a trip planner search that looks like this:

ALONG i-5 FROM boston, ma TO seattle, wa

See the problem? I-5 doesn't run between Boston and Seattle. AQ is smart enough to figure this out (which is kind of surprising, really, because AQ really isn't very smart at all). But rather than give you an error, it tries to fulfill your request the best that it can and turns your search into a linear search. It runs a straight line search from Boston to Seattle. If this is sufficient for you purposes, great. If not... well, you'll need to adjust your search and try again. =)

Using the trip planner on the Advanced Search page is a bit more complicated than before, but it's the ultimate in power allowing you to specify a start and end point anywhere along a route. If you can't remember how to run the search, there's help a click away by clicking the help button by the location. Or, alternatively, you can use the simple search page to run the search, then edit the search if you want to tweak the results more than the simple page would allow you to do directly.

And finally, you can use a trip planner wherever you see this location option in a search--including event searches! So, for instance, you can search for all events within 30 miles of I-5 between Sacramento and Seattle. A neat little perk. The output of the results isn't as cool as with letterboxes--there's not a special column for distances or distance off path of the events since I figured when an event takes place is more important than how far it is between two events on different dates. I doubt this feature will be used often, but it's there if you ever need it! =)

And.... I think that covers all that's new with the trip planner. It's bigger and better than ever before! And I'm not even done updating it. ;o)

Counties? They really do exist!

2011-07-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

Please, don't play with the broken glass.....

Today's serial installment about the Great Update I did last night will be about counties. When I first created Atlas Quest, I made an enormous blunder: I didn't include information about counties with each location. I chose not to do this because it seemed like a quaintly American thing and I was trying to create a website that could support locations from around the globe--most of which has no concept of counties. And anyhow, who cares about counties? I was more concerned about cities. That, and the state it was in, was enough to narrow down the correct city, right?

Wrong.... way wrong. Turns out, there are huge number of small podunks and small towns or even parts of towns that have the same name in the same state, and it wasn't long before the first reports of towns being in the "incorrect" location started coming in. However, they were typically small enough that I would manually change the location to the "correct" place and just not support the town in the "wrong" place. It's not an ideal solution--only admins could move towns, so if you found this problem, you had to go through us. And, more often than not, people didn't even realize that boxes they listed sometimes ended up mapping to the wrong part of a state.

Additionally, especially for people who live in large states, it would have been handy to be able to list a mystery box as being "somewhere in XYZ county" instead of "somewhere in ABC state." For a small state such as Rhode Island where any mystery box in the state is practically walking distance, not a big deal. For a large state such as California or Texas, a mystery box on the completely other side of the state may be a no-go.

And because of this massive design flaw introduced before AQ even opened for business, both of these problems lingered.

About a year after AQ went live, I tried to fix this problem after the fact. I worked on it for a couple of weeks, trying to fit counties between cities and states, and it was frustrating. And finally, it collapsed in a heap of failure. The way the database was structured, I just couldn't make it work, and I wasn't willing to commit to significant changes in the database to make it work--that probably would have taken me months to implement--assuming it even worked in the first place. I failed. Atlas Quest hobbled along, blissfully ignorant about counties.

Then I decided to support custom locations on boxes. Early on, while investigating certain aspects of what I'd need to implement, I noticed a problem with the geocoder AQ was using. (A geocoder, for those not familiar with technical terms, is a system that can translate an address into latitudue and longitude coordinates--critical for AQ to accurately map locations.) The geocoder AQ was using had been deprecated. Which means that it worked--for now, but Google might stop support of it at any time and that would leave AQ high and dry. I needed to replace the geocoder, ASAP.

That first geocoder I used was a huge learning experience for me, and if I had to rebuild a new geocoder, I could certainly do a much better job of it than my time around. The biggest issue was being overly reliant on just one external geocoder. What if Google suddenly stopped supporting the one I used? What if they changed their rules, or started charging for access beyond what I could afford? What I really needed was support for several geocoders--a minimum of two external geocoders, but the more the better. If one geocoder couldn't figure out the location you were trying to use, maybe a different one would? I could chain multiple geocoders together for a "super geocoder" capable of encoding locations that neither of them alone could do.

At this point, I was going slightly astray from my main goal of custom locations on boxes, but custom locations are only as good as the geocoders they are built from, and I was determined to make sure the new one would be awesome compared to the geocoder of the past.

When I looked at the geocoder Yahoo makes available, I found it included a piece of information I never had before: the radius of the location. For the first time, I had a source of information about the size of a location. There's a big difference between the size of a city such as Seattle and the size of a state such as California, and I immediately knew I could make very good use of such information to generate better search results.

And as they say, in for a penny, in for a pound. I was already going to completely rewrite the geocoders, I may as well start recording information about the size of the locations and the county that locations are in. Let's do this RIGHT! =)

It was time to take another whack at solving the "county problem." (Among others, but this blog entry will focus on the counties.) I toiled away for weeks, creating several geocoders, chaining them together, and associating counties with locations and storing information about the size of each location. And finally, I was done. It was working.

And now AQ supports counties.

When you list a new letterbox, you'll usually type in the city and state for your location, and most of the time, AQ will correctly figure out the county. If, however, you notice that the box seems to map to the wrong part of the state, edit your box and check the location. AQ will display what county it's using for your location, and if it's incorrect, you can fix it.

Additionally, you can now list mystery boxes that are "somewhere in XYZ county." For instance, you could list a mystery box as being in "King County, WA" or "Washington County, OR."

I noticed a lot of people added this information as the "address" of their mystery box, and I had AQ go through and automatically convert them into county-wide mystery boxes. It might not be a bad idea to double check the locations of the mystery boxes you planted to make sure AQ got this right. If you were clear and only wrote something like "King County" or "Washington County," there shouldn't have been trouble for the geocoders. If you tried typing something like "King or Pierce County," typed the name of the county incorrectly, or something like "Eastern King County"--something less than completely straight-forward, the geocoder was much more likely to choke on it and do something you may not have wanted.

Now a little about how to search for county-wide mystery boxes. If you visit the Advanced Search page, you won't find "Area Search" as a search type option anymore. The reason is simple: It's not needed anymore. To search for boxes in a county, just type the county name. King County, WA, for instance. This returns all boxes within the county--mysteries or otherwise. What if you just want the mystery boxes in King County? Before clicking that search button, click the "Mystery Boxes" attribute first to get this list.

When you run an area search like this, the "distance" option is ignored. All boxes are within the boundaries of King County. (As an aside, if you set the "distance" to zero, you can run an area search for all boxes within a city or even a specific park within a city. It forces all searches into becoming an area search.)

Now let's head on over to the Simple Searches page. I wanted to keep a simple version of an area search available, and you'll find that "state" part of an area search has been renamed into "region." If you look at the drop-down list, you'll see why--it includes all of the states and counties that you can run an area search for from the selected country. Before you go rushing off to run a search for your county, I should point out that the list does not include every county in the United States--it only includes counties if there's at least one letterbox listed as being within that county. For counties that have no boxes in them, you won't see them in the drop-down list. And that's okay--there's nothing to search for there anyhow. =) As soon as someone adds a box to the county (mystery or not, it doesn't matter), the county will start showing.

I also made another slight improvement that almost nobody will notice--but if you live outside of the United States, you'll love this one. =) When you open the Simple Search page, AQ defaults the country to the one you have listed in your profile. If you live in Canada, the area search will default to Canada. If you live in New Zealand, the area search will default to New Zealand. However, the only place AQ tracks your location is from what you type in your profile, so you'll need to fill out the location on your profile for this to work. (You don't even have to specify a specific city, county, or state--just listing the country is enough to make it work.)

So that's your lesson for today. =) Tomorrow, I'll be back with more details about the Big Update.

Three Months in the Making!

2011-07-12T22:28:00.000-07:00

Vrrrooooommmm!!!!!! Look ma, no hands!

The day the solution hit me was April 10th. I know this, because I was absolutely giddy when I thought of it, and I posted about it to the AQ Webmasters board so Wassa could bask in my brilliance. =) For years people have wanted to be able to add their own location information to boxes that could be used in their searches. So, for instance, if you solved a mystery box, you could mark the actual location and subsequent searches would return the box in that location. (Just for that person, though--not for everyone, of course!)

I love that idea--I've wanted to run with that idea for years but kept running into technical issues that stopped me cold. I just couldn't figure out how to keep the database queries running fast and efficient with such an option.

I got to thinking about the problem again after reading that Aiphid's Box Radar app let people do this. I'll admit--it was a little annoying. Here I've been suffering from this problem for years without a solution, and some young whipper-snapper comes along and does exactly that in all about a week with an Android app. That darned app has more functionality than Atlas Quest! Kudos to him, but still.... I was jealous.

I haven't seen the code for Box Radar, but I could imagine how it would work if I created it, and it would have been easy. Seems so unfair than a feature can be so easy for an app and so difficult for a website. But admittedly, the app only had to download a small subset of all boxes--probably less than a thousand--while Atlas Quest supported over 100,000 listings. And the data stored in an app can be changed without worrying about how it might affect others. He could overwrite the location data and not worry about someone else coming along and seeing it. It's not like someone else will come along in ten seconds and run the same search on the owner's Droid.

So I stewed in misery, unable to figure out how to implement something that, on the surface, seems so utterly simple.

Then I decided I needed to do something about it, and I implemented a page that allowed me to set a location for a letterbox and store it in the database. And when I pulled up the box listing, it would show the original location along with my own changes (if there were any). It was pretty, but completely and totally worthless because that information was never used in the searches. I couldn't figure out how to integrate it into the search results efficiently. Argh! For all the functionality it added, I could have just typed in the location as a box note and accomplished the same thing.

So I did what I often do when I run into a problem without a solution--I went for a walk to think. =)

And during this walk, the solution hit me. Smacked me right across the side of the head and left me silly. I could totally make this work. It would require a relatively small change in the structure of the database, and a heap of changes to the code that rested on top of it, but I was absolutely certain I could make this work. It would be a huge effort, though. The change to the database, as I said, was relatively minor, but the changes required in the code would be extensive. If it took less than a month, I'd be surprised.

And when I got back home, I posted to the webmaster's board to tell Wassa about my idea, which is how I know the solution finally hit me on April 10th. =)

Letterbox searches are at the heart of Atlas Quest, and I started making a mental list of all parts this change would affect and the added difficulty of transitioning from the one type of a search to a new type of search. I wondered, since I was going in deep to muck around with the code, if I could fix a few other issues along the way. I wondered how I could test my changes before rolling it out on the live website. The kind of changes this would entail invariably would break lots of stuff, and I worried what I'd do if it broke so badly I couldn't get it fixed quickly but already passed the "point of no return."

So I started taking baby steps. Early on, I discovered that the geocoder I was using had been depreciated and had to be replaced. Well, I thought, I could certainly make a few improvements to that! I spent weeks on it, creating multiple geocoders which I've talked about before. Then I connected them to profile locations--a low risk way to test the geocoders and fix any glitches with them.

Then I expanded it to blog searches--which had always been dreadful anyhow. I didn't put much effort into that in the past because I didn't really expect many people would use it, but now I could fix all those problems while testing the changes I would later introduce to boxes.

Then it expanded to virtuals, which had additional requirements and was the first solid test for how box searches would look and how they would work. Virtuals were easy, though--none of them ever had location information, so I didn't have to worry about making sure old code continued to work--just that the new code worked as expected.

Then it expanded into event listings, which was a little more challenging since it needed to work with older code. And all along the way, each feature touched by these changes improved, often times so quiet that nobody noticed. =)

And then finally, it was time to roll out the changes to letterboxes. The very heart of Atlas Quest. The new code I created seemed pretty solid and was designed to be very easy for me to reuse across the website, and--for the most part--I didn't expect any major issues rolling out the feature to boxes. There was still a lot of work to integrate the changes into Atlas Quest, but it would be manageable.

Yes, Wassa Jr., I too think it's time
for a break. Let's go hiking! =)

And, at long last, the feature I wanted to support, the feature I've been working towards for three months, is finally here: The ability to set a private location for a letterbox--a location that will be used instead of whatever the owner of the box listed whenever you run a letterbox search.

This feature has taken me three months to fully implement. Seems like a relatively easy, straight-forward feature, doesn't it? Okay, admittedly, I improved a few other things that this feature touched along the way, but for the last three months, this is the one I've been shooting for.

It was an enormous undertaking, and that's partly why I've decided to make it a premium member only feature for the time being. It's premium members that have supported me and allowed me to work for three months to get this feature implemented, and if I had been forced into a regular 9-to-5 job, I'd never have had the time or energy to implement it at all. This really is a feature that could only have happened because of support from premium members, so--for now, at least--this will be a premium member perk. Thank you, premium members, for your support. I couldn't have done it without you. =)

Now--let's get into the guts of the feature. When you view the box details page, you'll see the "Location" like you always have. Premium members will also see a "Custom Location" listed immediately below it. So even if you set a custom location, you can still see what the owner of the box originally had listed as the location.

Since no boxes will have a custom location until you add one, it'll say "None specified" along with a small icon of a pencil that allows you to set a custom location. Click that and follow the prompts to add a custom location to the box. Save the location, and you're done.

Now, all letterbox searches you run will use your custom location instead of the original location. The location shown on the search results page will be your custom location--not the original location used for the box. The only places you'll see the original location is on the box details page and the clue page, right next to the custom location you entered.

As always, with an update this big, there are bound to be bugs, so if something doesn't seem to work correctly, give me time to fix it. =)

Let me also note that there are several additional noteworthy changes with this update, but if I discussed them all in this post, you're head would probably explode. =) So.... I'm going to post about some of the other changes over the next few days rather than one enormously massive post that will make your head explode. If you see a change I haven't mentioned yet, be patient. You'll probably see me blog about it at some point over the next few days where I'll explain it in more detail.

Happy trails!

Another Year Older.....

2011-06-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

Seven years ago, Atlas Quest became a reality. I first started working on it earlier in the year--back in January, in fact--but it was in June when I finally decided that I was ready to take the website live, and it wasn't until June 24th that I committed to the name Atlas Quest when I purchased the domain name. It almost seemed astounding that the name was even available--Amanda and I considered all sorts of ideas for names but the domain name invariably wasn't available. I started uploading the website that night, but admittedly, it wasn't until the next day I finished getting it all up there. I was using a dial-up connection at the time, and uploading an entirely new website took some times. Especially the database that supported over half a million cities, towns and podunks from around the world.

That seems like a lot, but I actually narrowed it down from a list more than ten million locations I had information about. =) When I tried to run queries with that much data, however, the performance hit was dramatic. Maybe it was just on my development machine, but that much data had trouble, so I cut out a lot of it. And really, why did I need a list of a million locations in Russia? It's not like that country was a hotbed of letterboxing activity! So poof--I deleted all but the largest 1,000 cities or so. I could always add individual cities as needed later.

At the time, the only cities that AQ supported were ones that it already knew about. And being able to support addresses--specific points on the globe--wasn't even a twinkle in my eye. I was just happy I could support so many cities and towns from around the world. When I started my little project, I wasn't sure I'd be able to find the data I needed, or be able to make it run fast enough to be useful.

I was so proud of how many different cities that AQ could recognize, I even added that as a statistic on the AQ Statistics page. The number doesn't change very much, but occasionally, when a new city is added, the number might increase by one every now and then. As of this writing, it's up to 540,093.

Later, I learned about the Google geocoder--a wonderful little service that Google provides which allows me to send it a location (address or otherwise), and it'll return the latitude and longitude coordinates of that point. This was very cool, and I immediately set to work in incorporating it into Atlas Quest. It has its quirks, but without it, there would be no way to list boxes in locations more specific than being "somewhere in a city." It was a revolutionary development. I basically rewrote the core of the search engine around that Google geocoder.

But, oh, how quickly technology becomes obsolete.... Earlier this year, while working on a somewhat unrelated issue, I discovered that the version of the Google geocoder I was using had been deprecated. Which is a fancy word meaning it had been replaced with a bigger and better geocoder and that the old one could be discontinued at any time and should no longer be used. I needed to.... upgrade. *sigh*

I looked at the specs for the new Google geocoder version and didn't much like it. It seemed needlessly complicated, and I started poking around for other geocoders. By now, surely Yahoo or MapQuest or something had publicly available geocoders for use, so I poked around and discovered that I really liked Yahoo's newest entry into the world of geocoding.

I also decided that it would be a bad idea to rely on just one geocoder. What if it goes down, is changed, or discontinued unexpectedly? What if the Yahoo geocoder is depreciated to be replaced with something bigger and better later?

Without getting into the technical details, I wanted to create an interface that would allow me to switch out geocoders on the fly, almost like Lego pieces. This actually provides additional advantages--it means if I try using one geocoder and it cannot find the latitude and longitude coordinates of a location, I can try again with a different geocoder. And another. In the end, I now have about a dozen different geocoders working under the hood to try to interpret your locations.

The number of cities supported now is something of a misnomer. I created that statistic when the only cities supported were those that AQ already knew about. Once I added that first Google geocoder, it was capable of learning new cities automatically that it didn't know about before. I don't know how many cities the Google geocoder knows about, but it's certainly a heck of a lot more than AQ is familiar with, and there's not really any way for me to accurately count this number.

These new geocoders I'm adding support for, however, I'm designing from the ground up. The only locations the new database tables support are those that are actually being used by someone somewhere on Atlas Quest. So all those cities that AQ used to already know about in Lybia that never really got used will be gone. I'll depend on the geocoders to find that information for me as people need it.

As of right now--I'm still in the process of converting the old letterbox locations into new ones so this number will still go up (although probably not by much)--there are 19,207 different cities being used. A far cry from the 540,093 currently "supported," but that just goes to show that most of those locations just never got used. Not even half the cities and towns in the United States were being used.

In the Next Big Update, that "supported number of cities" in the statistics will be retired and replaced with a "number of cities used" statistic. I don't know how many cities are supported by the various geocoders, but I know it's even larger than ever before. Being able to look up specific coordinates for addresses in all sorts of countries has been added, and as companies like Yahoo and Google will continue to add more and better support for more and more countries throughout the world, AQ will also seemingly get smarter and smarter with each passing day.

AQ turns seven years old today. In that time, that original core search feature has been rewritten essentially from scratch twice. Which doesn't even include the countless minor tweaks I've had to make to it over the years. I'd like to think, "This time it's it. Once this is done, I'll never have to rewrite this stuff again." I want to think this, I see nothing on the horizon to think it's not true, but I also thought the same thing those last two times I wrote this part of AQ. I'd like to think I learned something from those first two coding attempts and that the third time's a charm--but I know I wouldn't make any bets on it. That's for sure. =)

On a completely unrelated note.... I wrote a small piece of code a couple of months ago capable of counting the number of various file types I've developed.

As of this minute, on my development machine (I didn't install the code on the live website), you'll find these numbers:

982 HTML files: that's now many individual URLs that AQ handles and knows about. Some of these, admittedly, are test pages that I have no intention of ever uploading to the live website.

3739 image files: each icon, logo, background image--there are 3739 images for use across the website. GIF files rule with 1896, and JPGs are runner up with 1278 files. PNG files make up the bulk of the rest.

117 CSS files: as a general rule of thumb, each CSS is usually one theme, but there are a few that are not.

10 MP3 files: these are mostly for the chat room sounds, but one was used for the last April Fools Day =)

12 JavaScript files: almost every page on AQ uses JavaScript, but there are only 12 pages I created that have nothing but JavaScript in them. (These do not count JavaScript files that come from libraries such as JScript or Prototype--this number is about how many files I created and maintain.)

This website is amazing, but not really for any of the reasons I wrote above. These are just the behind-the-scenes stuff that I find interesting, but the real miracle is that Atlas Quest has thrived for the last seven years. When I started it, I didn't imagine this would become anything more than a hobby site, but you guys turned it into the community it is today. You've supported me, encouraged me, and I thank you. I might have built AQ, but it would still be an empty shell without all of you folks who populated it. =)

Anyhow.... enough reminiscing.... there's code I need to be working on! =)

And why was AQ down and there's no blog to tell about it?

2011-06-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

If only Anthony Weiner twitted this photo instead....

The title of this post was inspired by Dizzy, who posted this query to the Billboard Widget on AQ early this morning. (If you aren't sure what a Billboard widget is or why you don't see one available, that's probably because it's a premium member widget.)

The reason there's no blog to tell about it is because there's not much to tell. It's like a lot of those updates I often do without taking Atlas Quest down at all and nobody ever notices.... Changes happen, but you either can't see them, or they're so minor, you'd often not notice them.

But when I actually take Atlas Quest down and people know I'm up to something, there's that curiosity--what is Ryan up to? What is he changing? Something is clearly happening.... but what?

This particular update is the next stepping stone on the long road to a new and improved geocoder experience which I've blogged about before. This time, I rolled out the geocoder updates to event listings. If you add or edit an event listing, you'll notice that the "location" page of the listing has changed quite a bit, and--IMHO--is a lot less fussy about supporting locations that cannot be geocoded or if multiple matches are found. It even displays a cute little Google map of the location that was geocoded so you can confirm that that's exactly the location you were talking about.

The update itself was relatively quick and painless.... the reason I took AQ down for the better part of an hour was to convert the "old locations" into the "new locations." The conversion process isn't perfect, and I set up AQ to automatically do the conversions as well as can be expected, then had it send me a list of conversions that weren't "perfect." Anything where the old location didn't quite match the new location. Such as an old location of "3036 SW 3rd Ave, Seattle, WA, US" suddenly turning into "3, 3036, Beijing, Beijing Shi, China." I see something like that and I think, "Hmm.... something bad happened in that translation....." Then I'd laugh at my unintended pun before figuring out what went wrong. =)

About 3% of the conversions had problems. There are about 2,000 events now listed on AQ, so about 75 had issues I had to fix by hand. Japan and China listings were unusually common among those!

In truth, I wasn't especially worried about locations that were in the past. So if that event from five years ago is now listed as having took place in China, who cares anymore? =) But still, I looked through all of those old entries and fixed them because they were test cases that failed! I needed to figure out why these entries had failed and figure out if there was some way I could fix things so when someone is trying to list a new event, that doesn't happen again.

It's amazing what you can learn from things that don't work properly. =) I found several tweaks I could make to my own code that helped matters along a bit better, and if I tried running the conversions today, there would still be some failures--but almost universally cosmetic ones.

A cosmetic "failure" would be something like the old location being "Montana de Oro SP" while the new location maps to "Montana de Oro State Park." Technically, the location is correct and spot on and "fixing" this problem wasn't necessary. But still, it wasn't an "exact" match and my code isn't smart enough to realize that they were two different ways of saying the same thing, so it would report to me the "non-perfect" conversion.

It's important I get this right, because eventually, I want to roll out these same changes to boxes. There are currently over 100,000 traditional letterboxes listed on Atlas Quest, and about 65,000 of them are listed as "active." When the locations for these boxes are updated, I need to make sure they don't end up in China! And while I could go through 2,000 event locations in one night correcting errors, going through 100,000+ letterbox listings is a mammoth undertaking that could take eons. I will need perfect conversions with a high success rate. Even with a 1% failure rate, I'd still have to manually fix over a thousand listings.

And while fixing the listings, it also allowed me to use the real code for editing locations on the live website. It let me check that the maps were displaying correctly, and it let me check that it handled things properly when no exact matches could be found, or when more than one matching location was found. I was able to do a lot of testing during the process of fixing problems! =)

It was a grand old time, let me tell you. ;o)

In related news, everything that comes with the new geocoders also works with events now. For instance, you can now run a linear search or rectangle search on events. Additionally, if you pull up an event listing, you can now tag it with a "custom location." Imagine an event that's a mystery location--once you've figured out the location, you can specify it in your custom location, and it'll show up in event searches at your specified location. (Nobody else can see your custom locations, though, so it won't be a spoiler for others.) And the new geocoders are much improved over the old one. Thousands of more parks and places are now supported than ever before.

Lots of good stuff going on! =) But unless you're an organizer for an event, you won't really notice most of them at the moment.....

My First Plant

2011-06-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

The day was May 12, 2001. I carved several stamps including an oak tree, a spider web, a butterfly, and a worm. I was impressed with myself. These were my best stamp carvings ever! Well, the worm wasn't particularly great, but I had a long, skinny piece of the pink stuff, and I hated the idea of it going to waste, so I was determined to carved something out of it. Being so long and skinny, my options were limited to a snake or a worm. I'd already found two or three boxes that had snakes carved, however, and I wanted to be different, so I carved a worm. Nobody--so far as I knew--had ever carved a worm before. Come to think of it, I'm not sure anyone has ever carved a worm since. =)

Back then, I always stamped my signature stamp into my planted boxes--a practice I've largely stopped doing mostly out of laziness than any real reason. And this logbook is the only logbook I know of, still in the wild, that had my original signature stamp in it. I only used this signature stamp in maybe two or three dozen boxes--I soon replaced it with a purple spider stamp because I quickly realized that the signature stamp was much too large for many logbooks! I used this signature stamp for about a month before retiring it. And that was ten years ago--the logbooks I stamped it into have either gone missing or the logbooks damaged by water.
I based it on a photo I took of Mount Hood, near where I lived at the time, and carved my initials into the stamp to really "make it mine." I didn't have a trailname back then, I was just Ryan. I'm also amused that I ordered people to plant their own letterbox and let me find it. =) Back when I planted this series, there were 30-some letterboxes in the entire state of California, and none in San Luis Obispo County where I planted the series. Getting others to plant boxes was important!

I look back at the stamps today and shake my head. So primitive. So simple. I still like them, though. Of the four boxes I originally planted that fateful day, only that worm has survived the whole ten years. The oak tree went missing almost immediately, and I've carved a couple of replacements since. The butterfly lasted a couple of years, but it too met its demise and was replaced on a couple of occasions. The spiderweb survived for most of the decade, which was all the more surprising because it was found on a regular basis by muggles who'd sign in about how exciting it was to find the box by accident. They kept the logbook and stamp there for years. The last few years, however, have not been kind to that box. Seems that potheads found it and stopped leaving it in such a pristine condition. The box lingered on, but the logbook faced water damage when the ZipLocks failed. I replaced the logbook on a couple of occasions, but when I checked up on the series last Friday, the stamp was gone.

But the worm keep on ticking.... The box celebrated its tenth anniversary last month, and still had the original stamp and original logbook in the box. The original logbook really surprises me. About a hundred people have logged in, and it's still the original logbook! Stamps can survive water damage, but logbooks generally do poorly. Invariably, ZipLocks always fail. It's not a matter of if--it's a matter of when.

And this box is no exception--the ZipLocks have failed multiple times over the years, and I've replaced them, yet the logbook has always stayed dry. Or at least never more than a slight dampness about it, like dew on the grass in the morning. And you want to know the secret of longevity for this letterbox? A boardwalk.

I hid the letterbox under a boardwalk. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was the perfect hiding place. The boardwalk had about two inches of space under it--not enough for people or kids to play under and find the letterbox. The boardwalk had boards pressed right up against each other--no large gaps that rain would fall through. Oh, water could (and does) dribble through the slots between the boards, but most of the water sheds off the sides. The hiding place essentially is a roof for the letterbox to protect it from the elements, and that's why the logbook has survived for so long.

I also included a logbook with a lot of pages--the tiny logbooks common today were a rarity back then. People had more space to write messages (and did so!), so the logbook never filled up despite the hundred or so people who have found it.

That's an important lesson to remember. When you're out looking for a place to hide your letterbox, look for a location where it won't be found by accident, and look for a location that has a natural "roof" to shed rain. I've used fancy, seal-tight containers, but they can fail. Some are better than others, but even the mighty Lock-n-Lock can fail. ZipLocks will also fail. And when they both fail, your logbook is toast.
The best, idiot-proof way to keep those logbooks intact for years and years is a hiding place where water just won't drip on it in a rain storm. These kind of locations aren't easy to find, and in many places, it may be absolutely impossible. But look for them. Holes in a tree (as long as the hole doesn't open skyward), under large rocks that can shed rain water, and under man-made structures like boardwalks that can shed water to the sides. These are the kind of places where a logbook can survive for a decade or more, even when the container and the ZipLocks fail.

I also like this logbook because people have written lots of messages in it. Many logbooks today are too small to really write anything, but if you give people enough space, at least they have the option to do so. The larger the logbook, the more likely people will fill it up with stamps and words. Of course, the larger the logbook, the harder it is to find a good place to hide the letterbox. Give and take, ying and yang. =)

I've thought about replacing this logbook for years. Not because it was almost full, but because it had so many finders, so many stamps, and so many wonderful messages written in it. If it was ever lost or damaged, I'd be heartbroken. Most logbooks I've planted I don't have any sentimental attachment too, but this one is special. It was while visiting this logbook with Jess and Wes (AQ members #2) that I felt my first (and thus far, only) earthquake in California. I was sitting on the boardwalk when I felt it shake a little, and at first I thought one of them was shaking it. They thought I was, which was when I realized it was actually a small earthquake and had the pleasure to tell them they felt their first earthquake ever. =) And how lucky were they? I grew up my whole life in California and never felt an earthquake. They visit the state for two days and get to experience one! It was just a small quake, though. Later we learned it was 5-point-something. Enough to feel it, but not really enough to do any damage.

But I wanted to see if I could keep it out there for a full 10 years. And finally, it's been 10 years. A decade. I've switched out the logbook with a new one. The original stamp is still there to found.

When I started Atlas Quest, I needed to populate the site with letterboxes, and naturally I started by adding all of my plants, in the same order I planted the boxes, so the Los Osos Oaks Series officially become box #1. A historical moment in AQ's history, to be sure. =) As I type this today, the last letterbox listed on AQ is box #173076. (I'm waving at you, Canada!)

When I checked up on the boxes last Friday, one box was missing completely. The box I call the pothead box was still there, but the logbook was soaked through and the stamp missing, so I've removed it for now. The worm was still alive and well, but I replaced the logbook just to preserve this one forever. And the last box was severely water damaged, so I replaced that logbook as well.

Whenever I've replaced these boxes, I've always carved exact duplicates of the original stamps, even though my carving abilities have improved dramatically since then. After ten years, though, I think I'd like to do something more. I want to carve new and improved stamps the next time I replace the boxes. Trails have changed since I originally wrote the clues, and I want to fix that up a bit. The next time I'm down visiting San Luis and go out to this park, I'd like to expand the series. This series is special to me, but by golly, it needs a facelift, and I'm going to give it one. =)

Whistle Stop!

2011-05-24T01:21:00.000-07:00

Wassa looks for a place to hide a box on
Plant-a-Letterbox Day.

Yes, once again, whistles are available in the AQ Marketplace while supplies last. =) Nothing new or interesting to report--just the arrival of more whistles!

"What'd you break this time?"

2011-05-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

Glad you asked! Pull up a chair and I'll tell you a little about the update I did tonight. It's not actually very exciting and, on the surface at least, any changes you see would probably seem rather superficial. This update deals primarily with the blog code, and anything you find that appears to be broken is most likely to deal with any page or widget that deal with blogs.

And even then, on the surface, the changes seem largely superficial. Underneath the hood, it's been almost completely rewritten. You'll notice that "objects" listed on Atlas Quest such as boxes, trackers, events, groups, virtuals, and themes have a lot of very similar functionality. They all show up on the Advanced Search page, for instance. You can save favorite searches for any of those types of objects, you add each of those objects through a "wizard" that takes you through one or more pages of information. Each object always has a name, attributes, a creation date, and a last modified date. You'll find that you can add notes to boxes, trackers, events, and virtuals. For all of their differences, they have a lot in common.

Which is why, many, many moons ago, I designed a little bit of code that all of these objects are descended from. I implement that functionality once, and it gives everything derived from it all of those powers, and this update moves the whole blogging system under this same umbrella. Blog searches can be run directly from the Advanced Search page, and you'll find there are cute little icons to represent the different types of blogs. You can sort, filter, and chop up the blogs in a hundred different variations, and because it's under this same umbrella with all sorts of useful features readily available, I can easily add the ability to allow notes for blogs, or add tags to blogs--but you currently won't see those as options only because I couldn't think of how they could possibly be useful. But... if there was ever a reason to add such functionality, it would be pretty easy to do.

I spent a lot of work updating all of the blog code to use this standard interface that all these other objects in AQ does, and frankly, none of these advantages are especially compelling for the amount of work it required. The old blog search had one horrible flaw--you were required to include a location of the blog for your search. It was impossible to search for "all blogs" by a certain person, for example. I knew it was a bad thing when I implemented it, but it was quick and easy and a search I figured few people ever used anyhow so I cut corners. I cut a lot of corners with the blog code, and it showed, and this update fixes a lot of those issues.

But still, that wasn't the reason I made this update. Nope, no.... This was actually just a test for a much more important feature I've been developing--a new geocoder. Actually, there are now nine new geocoders at this point, and I'm not sure I'm done making new ones. =)

Premium members already have a hint about some of the things I'm working on--they've had a chance to play around with the new geocoders. The last time I took down AQ for an update, it was to upload the new geocoders, which was installed into the profile locations as the first small step in testing it. Test with a feature that's simple and not particularly important first.

This is step two in the long process of upgrading the geocoder. The profile allowed people to type in their location and use the new geocoder to figure out what it meant. I now needed to actually test that information in a real, honest-to-goodness search. One that's significantly improved over the existing location-based searches. And ultimately, that's what I wanted to do with this update.

Blogs are tied to members, and members can specify their location, so it makes sense you can search for blogs by local letterboxers, and because the member profiles are using the new geocoded information, a search for blogs by people in a certain geographical region would require a search on the new geocoded information.

And if I messed something up terribly--well, better to have problems with the blog searches than with letterbox searches! =)

You can't see distances or locations when you use the location for the search--it didn't seem especially relevant for blog searches--but I've been doing a lot of testing on my development machine with this search. It's pretty cool.

First, you can leave the location blank. In this case, all blogs are returned, regardless of location. (By comparison, the Location-based search on the Advanced Search page, AQ will complain loudly and annoyingly that you must include a location.)

Second, you can type in any city, street, address, park, or zip code. (By comparison, this works exactly like the Location-based search on the Advanced Search page.) If the radius is set to zero, it'll return all boxes with the specified city, street, or whatever. (Not the zip code, though, since zip codes are simply converted into a city internally and a city search is run.)

And finally, you can type in a county, state, or country as the location--and not a city name!--it'll return a list of all blogs owned by people who've registered that county, state, or country as their location. (By comparison, the Advanced Search page can run an area search, but that's actually separate from the location-based search, and even that doesn't have any concept of counties.)

The geocoder is a bit smarter than the old one as well. It's capable of finding thousands of parks that the old geocoder couldn't identify. And it's even more forgiving if you type in latitude and longitude coordinates, allowing commas (the old one required the latitude and longitude to be separated by a space) and allowing N, S, E, and W to be used instead of + or - coordinates. (You do still have to use decimal numbers, though--degrees, minutes, and seconds still won't work.)

All-in-all, it's a huge improvement over the old geocoder. And honestly, the power of the geocoder is being wasted on a mere blog search. =) But like I said, I'm still doing a lot of testing and tweaking, and I'd rather mess around and break a blog search than a letterbox search!

So that's what this update does. In a nutshell, on the surface, it doesn't appear to be much. Eventually, though, when I roll out these updates to the rest of the website.... it's gonna be awesome. *nodding* =)

But.... back to the blogs. I added a new subtype of blog I called "external" to describe blogs that are by people not on Atlas Quest. There are blogs I like to read that aren't by fellow letterboxers, but when I originally created the blog code, I assumed everyone would register their own blog. Obviously, I don't expect the owner of Cake Wrecks (for example) to register an account on Atlas Quest, list their blog, just so I can subscribe to it there. =) It was a huge oversight on my part, and I added the "external" subtype to make up for it. And after I uploaded all of my changes, I registered the Cake Wrecks blog. Now I can see the latest cake disasters between Trekkie Gal's postcards. And really, how cool is that? =)

Black is the New In

2011-05-10T16:54:00.000-07:00

The Atlas Quest whistles are back in stock! And there's a new kid on the block--black! I ordered a bit more than I did last time, and assuming those with fast trigger fingers last time got their fill, I hope this batch of whistles lasts at least a bit longer! But admittedly, I would not be surprised if these do sell out relatively quickly, and if they do, I will order more based on whatever colors sell out quickest. So if you do have a favorite color, it's better to order sooner rather than later! It might be another couple of weeks to get another re-order in!

In other news, I just got back from a long cross-country road trip late last night and picked up my mail today. It looks like a lot of them are checks--probably from whistle orders that didn't arrive before I left for the trip. I haven't opened them yet, but if you have sent a payment by check, I probably have it, and I'll try to get those whistle orders in the mail tomorrow. You'll get an AQ mail from me by tomorrow if I have received a check from you. =)

Happy whistling!

-- Ryan

And Your Favorite Color Is....

2011-04-27T10:57:00.000-07:00

Wassa Jr. searches high and low for a coveted
purple whistle, but alas, nothing....

PURPLE! Holy cow! I could hardly believe it when I woke up this morning, but the purple whistles are already sold out! And a close runner-up... red, which the time I type this, there is only one left. I wonder if it'll still be there by the time I finish posting this post.

For those of you planning to pay with a check--don't worry--the items are taken out of the inventory count as soon as your reach the invoice page with the payment options. You don't have to worry about not getting your favorite colored whistles just because the payment takes a bit longer to arrive.

The least favorite color: blue. Still have seven of those left, but still, that means I've already sold 18 of them!

And since I only have 12 whistles of all colors left (Really? I sold EIGHTY-EIGHT of these things in about 12 hours?), I will definitely order more whistles today. It'll take at least two or three weeks for me to get another shipment in, though, but there will be more, so don't be too disappointed if you missed your chance. Also, if you pay by check, do send the payment promptly. If I don't get payment within a week or so, I'll cancel the order to make those color whistles available to others.

-- Ryan

Get Your AQ Whistles!

2011-04-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

The whistles come in four colors:
blue, green, red, and purple.

A long, long time ago, way back on April 4, 2011, Housepitality Hostess posted to the message boards suggesting an AQ whistle for premium members. I liked the idea of a whistle--it's considered one of the ten essentials by many people and can help in an emergency when cell phone coverage is weak or spotty while out beating the trails in search of letterboxes. I saw no sense in restricting them just for premium members, but I liked the idea of an AQ whistle. So I poked around, looked up several companies that could create custom whistles, got some prices, and decided, hey--this is doable!

So I ordered them, and 100 bright and pretty whistles arrived this afternoon. Amanda grabbed a green one for herself, blew into it, and I can assure you--these things really work well! I ordered 25 in each of four different colors: red, blue, purple, and green.

And they are now available for sale in the AQ Marketplace! If you want one, order yours today! Once I sell out, I'm not sure if I'll order more or not. I guess it depends on how popular they are. I definitely won't be ordering more until I'm running low of all colors--so if you have a favorite color that sells out, there won't be more coming until maybe all of the other colors have sold out as well.

Happy (and safe!) trails!

-- Ryan

The Last Small Update

2011-04-11T23:53:00.000-07:00

SURPRISE!!!!! =)

You often hear me talk about the "Next Big Update." I use the term so often, I sometimes even abbreviate it as NBU. Sounds cool that way. =)

Well, I took AQ down this evening for an update, but admittedly, it's not particularly big, but there are a few items worth noting. In essence, it was the "Next Small Update." Or rather, now that the update is in the past, the "Last Small Update."

So what changed? First, if you check out the Letterboxing Preferences, you'll find a few new options. A number of months ago, I added options so you can eliminate boxes that have been abandoned for at least 6 months, boxes that have at least 3 strikeouts, and boxes that haven't been found for the past year. I think those numbers work fairly well, but I know darned well that others may feel differently.

And now--you can change them! Have at it! =)

The only other semi-functional change I can think of--on the Advanced Search page. There are a few new options to search for cemetery boxes, night boxes, rest area boxes, and boxes in historical locations. It's just a glorified clue search and isn't actually new functionality--it just makes it a little quicker and easier to search for specific types of terms. If you search for cemetery boxes, for instance, it'll also search for various derivatives of the term cemetery (e.g. cemeteries) and common misspellings (e.g. cemetary), and related words (e.g. graveyard). It's not a perfect search, and one test showed that about 10% of cemetery searches returned false positives. It'll certainly narrow down such boxes, however!

Those are the only functional change I can think of that was in this update--and that second one isn't even much of a functional change to begin with--but depending on the browser you use, you might see a number of minor cosmetic changes. I've been updating much of the website to use HTML5. There's a lot of cool new stuff available with HTML5, but only the most modern of browsers have relatively decent support for it, and even the most recent browsers don't fully support it. I can mark form fields as being "required," and the form will not submit until you enter data into it.

For instance, take the Advanced Search page. The location-based search requires you to enter a location. In the past, if you submitted the search without a location, it would come back with an error message to enter a location. If you try it now, the form won't even be sent to the AQ server--your browser will stop you. Exactly what it looks like and how the error is handled is dependent on the browser you use. My browser of choice--Firefox 4--highlights the location with a fuzzy, red border and a pop-up box that says, "Please fill out this field."

Another example, also found on that Advanced Search page, is the distance. I've marked it as a "number," and browsers that support it will force you to use a number. Firefox 4, alas, does not do this. I've heard that the latest version of the Opera browser does this, but admittedly, I haven't tried it in that browser. But as browsers are updated with the latest HTML5 support, I expect more and more of the validation to be done by browsers.

Another neat trick I added can also be found on that Advanced Search page. If you take a look at the "Member" option, you might see that the box for member has the word "Trailname" in it. That's a placeholder and disappears when you start typing. I added placeholders all over the place. The box name/number, the clue search, the location, and all over Atlas Quest. Not a big deal--if your browser supports it, you'd likely barely notice the change. But there's another feature of the Members box I want to point out: It's smarter. =)

When AQ sends that member box, it's waiting for you to type a trailname into it. Many websites today are fancy and start trying to predict what you're guessing for. Google searches do this. You type the first letter, and a bunch of common search terms starting with that letter show up in a list just below it that you can select from. Type another letter, and the possible search terms change to use those first two letters. I never implemented something like that because it seemed like too much work for the relatively little gain in slickness.

But with HTML5, I can send a list of trailnames with the box, and if you start typing, it'll give you a list of matching trailnames. It's not quite as slick as Google's search--I have to send all possible trailnames that can be used with the box. There are over 25,000 trailnames on AQ right now, and it's not especially efficient to include 25,000 trailnames every time you want to run a search! But really, whose boxes are you most likely to search for? Friends, of course! So rather than sending every trailname on Atlas Quest, AQ checks your contacts, your exchanges, and people you've AQ mailed and received AQ mail from, and sends just those trailnames. Chances are, whoever you're search for is going to be one of those names.

This effect works in Firefox 4, but I don't think it works with IE9 if I remember correctly. I've been trying all of these cosmetic features with all sorts of browsers--Firefox, IE, Chrome, Safari, and Opera, and I never really kept track of what worked with each browser. From what I've read and tested, Opera seems to have the best HTML5 support. (Not perfect, but still the best.) Chrome and Safari have generally excelled at support for HTML5 for quite some time. Only the very latest versions of Firefox and IE have any support for HTML5 (Firefox 4 and IE 9). IE 9 still has a lot to be desired. Firefox 4 I think is pretty good. But one thing I like about IE9--you can finally see the rounded corners! AQ looks so much better with rounded corners. (If you use IE9 and don't see rounded corners, take the browser out of the "compatibility" view.)

I'm having a lot of fun exploring HTML5. You'll likely see additional such tweaks over time, but the changes are largely cosmetic in nature and not particularly noteworthy for the most part. I won't be posting about them again in the future. =)

So there you have it. That's what was in this update. (At least the visible changes.)

Happy trails!

-- Ryan

Calendar Photo Reminder!

2011-04-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

Wassa Jr. says to tell everyone hi. =)

Have you been out letterboxing all winter, slogging through snow, mud, and the worst that the elements can throw at you? Then certainly you've got a few nice winter photos to submit for the annual AQ letterboxing calendar! If you're new to this, you can read all about it in the Project X link from the Marketplace menubar option.

And whether you are new or not, be sure to submit your photos now! Yes, the deadline isn't for months away, but those who wait until the last minute often can't find the photos they want to upload or submit them just a bit too late. Get it done now, then head out and start finding those perfect spring photos!

Those Nagging Little Details....

2011-03-23T21:48:00.000-07:00

I just uploaded a few tweaks to Atlas Quest this afternoon, and this one is so minor, it's probably not even going to be noticed by anyone. So, I'd like to bring your attention to it, if for no other reason than to let you know what I've been up to and, perhaps, catch any defects that I might have introduced.

In this case, an example might be the easiest way to explain this tweak. Take a look at this search of San Luis Obispo, CA, sorted alphabetically. The #2 entry is for the "Beach Vacation Series"--the quotes are part of the box name, not me quoting the box name. In the old days (that is, before today), Atlas Quest would sort boxes on a character-by-character basis, and because quotes come before letters, it would have shown as the first box. Now, quotes (and other punctuation marks) are ignored, so the box is now correctly placed after the A from All the News That's Fit to Print.

A related issue are box names that start with "useless" words--the, and, a, etc. In the old days (that is, before today), a box named The Building would have been sorted under the T's. If you check those search results, however, you'll now see it listed along with the other B's, where it should be.

Number 12 in the search results is called A Dragon in the Library: Adelinde. In the old days, it would have shown up in the A's. Today? Nope, not anymore.... It's with the other Ds.

Because punctuation marks are ignored, you'll also find that words like dogs and dog's map to the same word pattern. In the old days, a search for either of those words wouldn't find both of them. You can see this happen in a global search for boxes with the word dogs. In my results, the first six use the word dogs, but #7 uses the word dog's.

In another slight tweak in the search results, in this search for Winter Falls, you'll find none of the first several entries use the word winter. Why would they rank so highly, then? Because it's part of a series, and one of the boxes in the series use the word winter. If you click on the Silver Falls series, it ranks highly because there's a box within the series named Winter Falls. In the old days, AQ was not able to match words in the names of individual boxes within a series--but now it should!

Anyhow, these are minor little tweaks, but I'm a little concerned I've overlooked something. If you happen to notice any search results that aren't quite as expected or find an unexpected glitch, do let me know! Thanks! =)

New Edition of the Letterboxer's Companion!

2011-03-02T14:08:00.000-08:00

It only took eight years, but the second edition of The Letterboxer's Companion is finally out! =) I was going to write a book review of it--I got my grubby little hands on it several weeks ago, and I've never officially written a "book review" before. But now that the book is officially out, I find myself mired with other more important things to work on. *grumble grumble* Stupid bugs.... Seems like I've been hit with a number of difficult-to-fix issues recently, and I'm still working through the problems. (Fortunately, for the most part, the problems aren't that obvious, so most of you surfing Atlas Quest probably don't even know about them! But they're there, and they do need to get fixed.)

But I will say, I like this edition better than the first one. It's smaller, lighter, and a little more portable. Cheaper too--it's paperback! =) (There's even a Kindle version this time!) I read the book, from cover to cover, and it's certainly been updated with a lot of information about Atlas Quest that wasn't there before--mostly because Atlas Quest didn't exist when the first edition came out. There's a bit more detail about how to work the LbNA website as well.

Amanda had a copy of the first edition hidden away and I flipped through them both looking for anything that was different, and they were actually more alike than I remembered. Reading the second edition, it seemed like it had a lot more information about carving stamps than I remembered, but as it turned out--not really. Just my imagination playing tricks on me. *shrug*

There are a couple of places where new material was added. In the chapter of Advanced Techniques, Mapsurfer (a.k.a. Randy Hall) added a bit about book codes, which had me hunting through the book to solve an example one provided where the book code used his own book--a teasing message, but I'll let you solve that yourself. ;o) Then he describes "Other Codes and Ciphers," explaining what cryptograms are and an example of the Freemason's cipher (or "pig-pen cipher"). He describes what these codes are, but he doesn't actually explain how one would go about solving them--instead suggesting to the reader to research the ciphers on the Internet. Well, I suppose one could make a case for "teaching a man to fish" rather than "giving a man a fish," but still, it seems lazy to show these codes then not explain how to solve them. There are still plenty of other codes and ciphers to research on the Internet. Revealing the secrets of some of the most commonly used ones or a short section of letter frequencies would have been convenient.

There's a whole chapter on "Internet Resources" that been expanded greatly. The original book had a section called "Internet Resources," but I guess there wasn't enough material then to actually call it a chapter in its own right. It's now been upgraded to a full chapter in the second edition. Considering how much of our hobby is Internet based, it's a well-deserved upgrade.

Anyhow, the book was officially released March 1st. I looked on Amazon.com's website and they say that only 7 are left in stock (but more are on the way). Looks like it's already become a best seller! =)

For any serious letterboxer, you probably won't learn anything new from this book. But I still like it. It's small, compact, and light. And if you know someone who might be interested in letterboxing, this book could be the perfect gift. And who knows.... if a lot of people start using this edition as a code book for their clues, you might need the book just to find some letterboxes! ;o)

Sub-Accounts Have Arrived!

2011-01-06T22:46:00.000-08:00

I think I got the first request for a "sub-account" about two days after Atlas Quest went live. Okay, maybe it was three. It seemed like so long ago now. =) The main motivation, in particular, was the desire for a 'family' account--a way to identify oneself individually and as part of a family.

And I've never really been sure how to implement something like that. There's a lot of stuff to think about, and the logistics just thinking about it would give me a headache, so I put it off. And put it off. And put it off.

And while hiking the PCT, I thought about it some more and decided that if this feature would ever happen, I needed to actually DO something and play around with it. So shortly after I finished the trail, I followed through with the first step: Adding a column to the database that would do nothing more than point to a "parent" account. The master account. The family account. The primary account. Whatever you call it. It didn't actually DO anything, but it gave Atlas Quest a way to identify a simple relationship between to accounts.

And over the last couple of months, I've added a piece here and there--real functionality. First the ability to log into a sub-account using the password from the primary account. Then the ability for the master account to edit boxes and trackers if it was owned by the sub-account. Then the ability to read mail from sub-accounts through the primary account. And so on. A lot of little incremental improvements that, today, is quite a substantial feature in it's own right.

So now, you'll see a new link under the 'My Page' menubar option called 'My Accounts.' This is where you can control all of your accounts from one convenient location. =)

There are three distinctly different types of sub-accounts:

Aliases: Your alter egos, if you have any. Something like the Mystery Mailer would be an alias for a real person. Registering an alias with your primary account will allow you to post messages and send AQ mail from your aliases without having to log into your alias accounts.
Child: Child accounts are for the children in your family--typically those who aren't old enough to have their own accounts. Child accounts have additional restrictions that will not permit them to post to the message boards, send AQ mail, or drop into the chat rooms. Child accounts are generally only meant to record finds that your children have found--they don't really need all those other features. When recording finds, you'll be able to record finds on child accounts at the same time.
Adult: These are like the child accounts, but without the restrictions.

Each of the categories do have slightly different characteristics, so it does make a difference which you choose for each sub-account. The list above focuses on what makes the types different, but they also have a lot in common.

While logged into the sub-account, everything works like it always has. You won't see any changes. The real power lies in the primary account. The password for the primary account can log you into any of the sub-accounts. You can also reset the passwords for the sub-accounts from the primary account. And like I said before, you can edit the boxes, trackers, events, etc. of sub-accounts directly from the primary account. The primary account is also capable of reading the AQ mail of any attached sub-accounts.

There's also a new widget for My Page for sub-accounts. If you plan to make use of this feature, you'll probably want to add the Sub-Accounts widget.

Happy trails!

Flying around Google Earth

2011-01-02T12:38:00.000-08:00

Letterboxes from coast to coast!

Of all the major changes I listed yesterday, I overlooked one: maps. Most notably, KML files that work with Google Earth. The best way to see this in action is to try it for yourself. You'll need to download and install Google Earth if it's not already installed on your system to follow along with me.

Now, when a premium member runs a search for letterboxes, they'll see links for "KML" and "Network KML." KML is a specific file format and Google Earth is probably the best known program that supports it. Super cool stuff. *nodding* The original KML link has been there for years and still works the same as always. It returns a file with the first 100 boxes that your search matches, and you can zoom around Google Earth to see it. It's a static file, though, and never changes. It's still pretty cool, but has a couple of limitations--the fact that it never updates, and the fact that it will only show the first 100 boxes in your search.

The "Network KML" link gets around these limitations by specifying a special URL on Atlas Quest that Google Earth can contact to get the information it needs to display through a feature called "network links." When you click on the link and open it in Google Earth, it doesn't actually contain any information about letterboxes--just where on the Internet to get information about letterboxes.

After Google Earth loads the file, it connects to Atlas Quest and says something like, "The view of Earth is currently showing the entire United States. What boxes are there that are within this area?" And Atlas Quest will reply with the first 100 boxes that it finds in the database within the designated area.

Zooming into the San Francisco Bay area.

If, in Google Earth, you then zoom into California, Google Earth will contact Atlas Quest again and say, "Hey, my owner moved the map, and now it's only showing the area in California. What boxes should I display?" And Atlas Quest will again search through its database and reply with the first 100 boxes that it finds in California. The maximum number of boxes shown in a view is still 100--but it throws out the boxes that are no longer within that view and replaces them with new boxes that are still within the view.

If you then zoom in further, such as into the San Francisco Bay area, Google Earth will contact Atlas Quest again. "Hey, AQ, my owner just moved the view again. What boxes do you have that cover the SF area?" And Atlas Quest will give it another list of up to 100 boxes that are within that view.

You get the point. So while you'll never see more than 100 boxes listed in any given view, if you zoom around enough, you could--in theory--spot every single letterbox listed on Atlas Quest. And if you save that file and come back to it a year later, it again contacts Atlas Quest for the current boxes that match the search. If a box was deleted during that timespan, it'll stop showing up on Google Earth. Or if the box was moved, it'll move on Google Earth. Or if your search was original set to show only active boxes and a box had been retired, Google Earth will stop showing that box. The results are dynamic and always up-to-date.

This is very cool stuff. *nodding*

I zoom in even further, this time to San Jose.
Wait a minute, is that Wassa I see? Hmm... I think
I've been hacked!

And, it's mostly a premium member only feature. But if you aren't a premium member, don't feel too left out--I added a new Google Earth search to the Letterboxes menu. This link will show all active letterboxes around the entire world, and you do not need to be a premium member to use it. If you want to be able to hide plants and finds from those results, or only include boxes with a specific tag, or any number of other variations of the search, you'll need to be a premium member. But for most people, this particular link will be all you'll ever want. =)

So, that network link thing is new and pretty darned cool. And I totally forgot to mention it in my post yesterday. Too many changes in that update for me to keep track of! =)

While developing the network link feature, I discovered that Google also updated their maps API, so I upgraded the code to using their latest and greatest Google Maps API. As a result, you might notice some minor changes when you click on the "Map Results" link, but they're generally so minor you might not notice any changes. But if you think it just "looks" different but can't figure out why, you aren't going crazy. It too has been updated. =)

Starting 2011 With a Bang!

2011-01-01T14:14:00.000-08:00

Fireworks at the Space Needle--
that's what I watched to ring in 2011! =)

The long awaited Next Big Update (NBU) has come to pass, and it's packed full of stuff. Given the enormous amounts of new code in this update, I fully expect a lot of bugs to crop up. In fact, I already found and fixed five of them, and the update hasn't even been in place for a half hour yet. Make that six now. (I keep checking for errors AQ detects at the end of every sentence I type.) In any case, please be patient. If something isn't working correctly, I'll fix it.

Now--what all is new in this feature-packed update? Undoubtedly, there's something for everyone to love, and something for everyone to hate. =) (But I hope the former outnumbers the latter.) I won't get into details here (too many bugs to fix!), but I will run down some of the major additions and changes and let you guys poke around and figure out how it all works. I'll be updating the help pages the next few days to answer questions and add additional details to get the most out of the features.

So, without further ado.... some of the major things to look for:

Removed maintenance comments. After spending the better part of an afternoon removing maintenance "requests" such as "box is missing" and "watch out for mosquitoes!" I decided it was easier just to get rid of them. The icon can still be applied to a box--but no note can be attached to it. Any previously existing notes were added to the top of the clue page. (At least if it was an AQ hosted clue.)
There is no limit to the number of planters that can be added to a box. This probably won't matter to most of you, but if there's a box that was jointly planted by three or more people, you can now all get credit for the plant.
Carvers will no longer be notified of finds or attempts on their boxes. Before you start freaking out, please keep in mind that almost nobody will even notice this change. Anyone who was a carver on a box I've added as a contact--so you'll still be contacted for that reason. And when a box is first added, the carver will automatically be added to the list of contacts. For all intents and purposes, all carvers will still be notified of finds and attempts. The difference now is that they can drop themselves as a contact if they no longer wish to receive those notifications--an option that was not allowed before.
There's now a "Trackers in the Night" in profiles you view. It's like the "Ships in the Night," except this one shows the most recent trackers that you and the person who's profile you are viewing have both signed up for and has already launched. (Unlaunched trackers are not included in the list.)
There are new preferences now available. The Letterbox Preferences page (new!) is the key one to check out. You can now set it up to identify your search preferences. Do you want your plants and hides automatically hidden when you run a Simple Search? Now you can! You can also specify if you want attempts, strikeouts, abandoned boxes, and old last finds hidden (or not) by default.
On the Advanced Search page, you'll find three more search options available. You can now search for Box of the Week boxes, historic boxes, and rarely found boxes. Since this is automated, "historic" is purely a matter of numbers: Any box that was planted more than ten years ago and has been listed on Atlas Quest for at least five years is considered historic. I know a lot of you like to find those hard-to-find or unique boxes that few other people have, and that's what the "rare find" option does--it returns any box that has a last find date that's more than a year old. While the search page has icons associated with these options, these icons do not show on the box listings.
At the end of the Miscellaneous Preferences page, there's now an option for "App Password." Our resident app developers wanted to be able to create apps that allowed people to log in so searches could do cool stuff like hide your plants and finds or run searches based on the tags you've selected. You can increase the security of your account by creating an app password. When using the app, it'll ask for your trail name and password. They aren't supposed to store your password or later use it to log into your account, but I don't really have any way of making sure app developers are good and honest. By logging in with your app password, you can keep your real AQ password secret. If you do not select an app password, your real AQ password will still work with apps. But if you do have an app password, only that password will work--your real AQ password will not.
And finally, themes. You'll find that the themes page has been completely rewritten from the ground up. Anyone can now list a theme on Atlas Quest, just like listing a letterbox or tracker. The themes are searchable, and you can even be notified of new themes matching your favorite searches. Right now, the only themes listed are those created by Wassa and myself. The "theme details" page includes any relevant information about the theme (it's creation date, last modified date, the CSS used for the theme, etc.), but it also applies that theme TO the page so you can see it in action. And when you've selected a theme, there's a new "about theme" link (under the original link, if there is one) that will link to the theme's details page. There aren't any new themes added with this update--but how themes work has radically changed with this update.

And that, I believe, are the major changes you'll see. You might also notice any number of smaller and generally not-very-noteworthy changes as well, but the big ones are covered. =)

Happy New Year!

A Satisfied Eye Bleach Patch Customer

2010-12-11T03:18:00.000-08:00

Another satisfied eye bleach customer!

The first eye bleach patches have gone out, making their way to satisfied customers all over North America. I made a quick trip out to North Carolina to hand deliver some of these important letterboxing tools to Mama Wolf. As you can see, she's quite pleased with the results. You don't want to know what's behind the camera! We would not be smiling now without these eye bleach patches on!

Now everyone knows that Wassa is the brains and inspiration for eye bleach, but it was actually Mama Stork who first contacted me about the idea for eye bleach patches shortly after I finished hiking the PCT. I immediately loved the idea, but since it was Wassa's patented product, I threw the idea to him to ask if he wanted to run with it. Guess he was busy, because he said no, but he too loved the idea. So then it was up to me to create the patches.

When I saw the results, I knew it was something special and needed to think up a way to properly "introduce" the product to the rest of the world, which is when I decided on the eye bleach countdown idea. Wassa helped me research posts to use, an astonishingly simple job for him since he's in so many of them. =)

And the rest, as they say, is history. Order your eye bleach patches in the AQ Marketplace today! Supplies are limited!

And the #1 Reason To Buy Eye Bleach....

2010-12-08T02:30:00.000-08:00

Because it's now affordable! Yes, that's right folks! For the low low price of $3.00, you can buy yourself an eye bleach eye patch! Admittedly, it's not nearly as effective as the eye bleach itself, but you know what they say--you get what you pay for.

If you buy two, you can loop a strap through the handles and tie them around your head, covering your eyes. I recommend a system that allows you to flip them both down over your eyes--perhaps a spring-loaded action with a panic button at the ready to maximize your eye protection.

Start protecting yourself against rogue posts, events, photos, and Wassamatta_u by practicing safe message board reading. Order your eye bleach eye protection from the AQ Marketplace today!

Don't make me take off my waist pack.
I'm crazy enough to do it!

Eye Bleach Countdown #2

2010-12-07T03:00:00.000-08:00

An insult to peaches everywhere!

When asked if his back was round, Wassa explained that yes, indeed it was, comparing it to an "overripe George peach" but "twice as fuzzy." Need confirmation? Ask the 59 people who agreed. Even more disturbing, at least 72 people considered this information educational. Why would they do that? Because that was when they first realized they needed eye bleach. It's a survival tool.

Order your Wassa's Patented Eye Bleach from the AQ Marketplace today! Quantities are limited!

Eye Bleach Countdown #3

2010-12-06T03:00:00.000-08:00

Three words: Zombie Pole Dancer. Sometimes, it's not just the message boards where eye bleach is necessary--it's the photo gallery.

This is one of those things that you need to see to believe. Unfortunately, you'll never see anything again unless you keep Wassa's Patented Eye Bleach nearby! Buy yours from the AQ Marketplace today!

Eye Bleach Countdown #4

2010-12-05T03:00:00.000-08:00

Reason #4: In one of the most shocking posts ever, details of which I still don't fully understand, included information about a letterboxing event hinting about guys in drag, DD falsies, maternity dresses, self-adhesive nipples on Wassa's butt, and Wassa stamping in exchanges with his butt. All in the same post!

While I am pleased to report that, so far as I know, none of these images ever made it onto Atlas Quest, I cannot be certain that will stay the case. It's like a ticking time bomb. Be prepared. Have your eye bleach ready! Order yours from the AQ Marketplace today!

Eye Bleach Countdown #5

2010-12-04T03:00:00.000-08:00

Reason #5: Unfortunately for you folks, Wassamatta_u is one of the most prolific posters on Atlas Quest. Also unfortunate for you, he also has absolutely no sense of shame. Below, you'll find a video of him singing the MSU fight song. Ear bleach may even be appropriate, but we don't have that. We just recommend you turning the volume on your computer down if you dare to hit the play button.

There's a reason Wassa's name is on our patented eye bleach. He's also the reason that eye bleach is considered one of the "10 letterboxing essentials." Order yours in the AQ Marketplace today!

Eye Bleach Countdown #6

2010-12-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

Reason #6: Sometimes it's not the content of the post that requires eye bleach, but rather where the post will lead. In this case, we are introduced to the website People of Wal-Mart. If you had eye bleach available when this post was first made, it might have saved you thousands of dollars in medical bills and therapy. Don't be caught without Wassa's Patented Eye Bleach in the AQ Marketplace again!

Eye Bleach Countdown #7

2010-12-02T03:00:00.000-08:00

Reason #7: Kirbert announced a disturbing little habit: he likes to walk around his 73-acre property nekkid, even going so far as to say he'll often do this days at a time. "But!" I hear you thinking, "That wasn't too bad! Maybe made my eyes water, but I don't need eye bleach."

Think again. And again. And it even runs in the family. Heaven forbid, I hope you never find him on Google Maps. This is a problem that won't go away. Get Wassa's Patented Eye Bleach from the AQ Marketplace today!

Eye Bleach Countdown #8

2010-12-01T03:00:00.000-08:00

Bobguyman was kind enough to forward this
photo to me. Don't let this happen to you!

Reason #8: You never know when, where, or who will be the cause of your desperate cry for eye bleach. This time, it comes from one of our youngest and most innocent members: Bobguyman. In this post, he describes an uncomfortable and very personal account with a tick where the sun don't shine.

It's not easy to read, but ticks are a danger that letterboxers everywhere must cope with. This event could have happened to any one of us. By all means, necessary reading, but you can protect your eyes with Wassa's Patented Eye Bleach--available in the AQ Marketplace.

Eye Bleach Countdown #9

2010-11-30T03:00:00.000-08:00

Can you find the stamp
in this photo?

Reason #9: This post practically needs its own wayback machine, having been posted in 2006. That just goes to show there's been a need for eye bleach for years! And the need will not go away!

This particular post concerns a dog that may have eaten the stamp out of someone's letterbox. Wassa suggests that if the stamp wasn't chewed up too badly, it might still be salvageable--we always hope for a happy "ending" in these types of matters. =)

Get your eye protection today! Wassa's Patented Eye Bleach is available in the AQ Marketplace.

Clues! Clues! Clues!

2010-11-29T15:09:00.000-08:00

Who would have thought a single button could cause so much trouble? In this case, it's the "print friendly" button that was found on clue pages. I got rid of it because it was redundant, and I didn't want to maintain the same code on two different pages. A surprisingly large number of people are trying to convince me that the two pages were not redundant.

I guess this makes a little sense--from your point of view, the "clue page" and "print friendly" pages looked different. They used different colors, and the photos used weren't always the same. (The clue page, all photos always showed in a small small. On the print-friendly page, only clue photos showed up in the largest size available.) But in the end, the printouts of the clue should be almost identical to before.

And yet, everyone is up in arms. Why?

Seems there were several reasons. First, some people liked to look at the "print" friendly page because they had trouble reading clues with low-contrast colors. The complaint wasn't in the printout--is was that the "print" friendly was visually easy to read on the screen than the "screen" version. I don't want to maintain a "print" page just for "screen" reading, though. That just seems absurd. If I wanted that, I'd call it a "screen friendly" page.

But I do recognize and agree with the fact that some people pick absolutely dreadful color combinations in their clues. For those who are tired of this, you'll now find a new option at the end of the Miscellaneous Preferences page to "decolorize" the clue page. By selecting that option, AQ will display all clues using the default color settings. You'll never have to see an ugly color combination again--unless, of course, you think the default color combination I selected is ugly. In that case, all of the clues would have my hand-selected ugly color combination. ;o)

The other major complaint was that clue photos were too large. They took up most of a page and wasted too much ink. I'm still unclear why that's only a problem now--that's always how AQ worked. Clue photos might have important details that won't show up in a reduced image, so AQ has always displayed the largest photo provided for printed photo clues. Unfortunately, a lot of people make a habit of loading photos that are WAY bigger than they ever needed to be. AQ has no way of knowing this, however, and would happily have you print whatever photo was uploaded. It's a habit that's annoyed me for years. Apparently, starting today, it's also a habit annoying everyone else. =)

So I've changed the default printouts to now use a smaller image. For the vast majority of photo clues, this is not an issue. "But!" I hear you thinking, "What if the photo clue requires the details seen in the larger image?!"

You'll have to print that separately, on a different page. Just click on the photo to load the large image and print that. Yeah, you might have to print the clue twice--once with the text and words, and once again for the photo itself--but I'm not sure there's any way I can get around that. AQ just cannot determine if the large version of a photo clue has important details that are lost in the small version. The "default size" can't be adjusted for each photo--that's what makes the "default" a "default." They all come out the same size.

The "print all" clues option uses cached version of the clues, so those will continue to use large images for the time being. As the clues are re-cached, they'll be replaced with the smaller image. This re-caching process will take a month or two to complete.

So for now on, AQ is going to print the smaller photos as the default. You will need to explicitly load and print the large version if that's the one you want and need. Fortunately, most clues aren't photo clues, and even among those that are, the largest photo option isn't necessary to find the clue.

Still don't like that default? No problem! It too is now a preference found at the bottom of the Miscellaneous Preferences page. If you'd prefer all photo clues to show up as large as possible, change your preference.

And finally, some people have expressed disappointment with the size of printed text. I haven't changed this at all, so I suspect there's just some latent grumbling finally coming to the surface. First, check your Usability Preferences. AQ will allow you to set the display text size to be different from the print text size. Some people like to print text as small as possible to save ink and paper, so the two settings are completely independent from each other. If you find printed clues have text that's too small, increase the size of your printed text.

Still too small? Well, I suppose if it's necessary, I could make even larger font sizes available. But before I do that, check your own print settings. When you print a page, most browsers will pop up a print dialog box with all sorts of settings to choose from. I quite regularly shrink the text size when I print from most websites using those options, so I know it can be done. So check your printer settings. I can't do that for you.

The print friendly button will not be coming back. I'd rather make sure your visual experience is what you want it to be when you view your screen, and your print experience to be what you want it when you print the page. I can control each of those things individually from the same page, and that's what I intend to do. You do not need two separate pages for each of these tasks.

Eye Bleach Countdown #10

2010-11-29T03:00:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, we have a small supply of Wassa's Patented Eye Bleach in the AQ Marketplace. You'd think it would be a best seller, but it's not. Even after giving a 50% price break, I still haven't sold a single one. Unfortunately, my limited supply does have an expiration date and I need to clear out my stock. It's a fabulous product, though, so I'm going to remind everyone all the reasons why you should order yours today--before it's too late and you find yourself with an uncontrollable desire to stab out your eyes with a blunt knife. Each day, for ten days, I'm going to countdown the top ten reasons you need to order yours today!

Reason #10: You'd think a message board about computers, iPods, and other electronics would be a safe place to visit. But you'd be wrong. It was revealed that some of my best work was done in the bathroom. In that spirit, I grabbed my laptop, headed to the bathroom, and started this series of posts. I need the inspiration. It's also where I keep my eye bleach. I'll likely need it.

Cyber Monday Special! In honor of Cyber Monday, all products are 20% off! This includes patches and the 2011 Letterboxing Calendar! Only while supplies last! And only on Monday. If you were thinking about ordering anything, now's the time to do so!

A Message Board Tweak

2010-11-10T02:44:00.000-08:00

A message from your founder....

If you read the message boards on Atlas Quest, you've probably already notice that posts now include a thumbnail version of the image you've uploaded to your profile. Certainly gives a little extra splash of color to the message boards--that for sure! =)

Many times people have asked for the ability to add an 'avatar' for their posts, which I've generally resisted as being unnecessary clutter. Technically, it is completely unnecessary, and for those working on slow Internet connections, such images could slow down the load time for the boards considerably. That's why you'll now find an option in the Miscellaneous Preferences to turn these images off.

I've decided to leave them on by default--my gut feeling is that most people will enjoy the change and most people are on fast, broadband connections. But you can turn the images off if you don't like them or they slow down your connection speed too much.

AQ will also repress the images automatically if you are viewing the "mobile version" of Atlas Quest. If you're using your iPhone, for instance, to read the message boards, you won't see the images until you've changed to the "standard view." (You can switch between the mobile and standard views from the main AQ page, at the bottom of the last column.)

Enjoy!

Mapping with Advanced Searches

2010-11-09T12:30:00.000-08:00

The advanced techniques explained in this post
won't kill you--so give them a try! =)

I got a request today from someone asking if it would be possible to map their finds on Google Maps. And the answer is--absolutely! In theory, it's pretty easy to do, but it's an advanced option that most folks probably don't even realize it's possible.

So today, I'm going to talk a little about the Advanced Search page. It does a heck of a lot of stuff!

First thing to notice is the "Search Type" in the upper-right corner of the page. Be sure to check out all of the options available here. By default, the location-based search is the first one shown since it's--hands down--the most common search used on Atlas Quest. There are actually six distinctly different types of searches for traditional boxes, however! I won't get into all of the details for each of them in this post since most of them are self-explanatory, but I think a lot of people overlook all of these options since the control is tucked away there in the upper-right corner of the page.

Another thing about that control to keep in mind: Everything listed under Other Searches has additional options. For instance, if you change it to Stamp Collections, you'll be able to access the whole world of non-traditional boxes such as hitchhikers, LTCs, postals, etc, etc. (Keeping in mind that virtuals are NOT considered an official box type anymore and can no longer be found in that category. No stamps involved, so it's not a collection of stamps.)

The Trackers category allows you to search for all of the various types of trackers on AQ.

Lots of search options
to choose from!

And any search that doesn't fit into the Letterboxes, Trackers, or Stamp Collections categories--they fall into the Miscellaneous category. This includes event searches, group searches, and virtual searches.

In all, at this time, there are 23 distinctly different searches that can be selected, and that number continues to grow over time. Eventually, I hope to add photo searches, member searches, blog searches, message board searches, and more. All of these search options already DO exist--they just haven't been incorporated into the Advanced Search page--they're spread out all over the website.

But back to the letterbox search options.... Let's say we want to map all letterboxes planted by myself. Since I've planted boxes all over the world, I'll need to use an All-Locations Search. This just about boxes I've planted in San Luis Obispo or Seattle. This is a list of all of my boxes!

Next, there are several options selected by default. The default searches are designed to help people shift through the thousands of listings on AQ for boxes that the searcher wants to find--which is why only 'active' and 'unknown' box status are included in the results, and only boxes that have clues attached, and only boxes that have been found recently and don't have lots of attempts on them. I want all my plants showing up, though, so I need to adjust these default by de-selecting them. Click-click-click... and change the settings like this.

One of the most overlooked options in the Advanced Search page is the "member" box that allows you to search for boxes based on who is the planter, carver, owner, finder, or not the finder. That last one is useful if you're going letterboxing with a friend and you want to figure out what boxes both you and your friend have not found. Since I'm self-centered, however, I just want to see a list of all of my plants. I add my trailname to the text box and check the 'planter' radio button.

Page 1 of my map results extends all the way to Africa!

And finally, I want the list sorted in the order that I planted the boxes, so I change the sort order to Oldest Planted. There are 13 different sort options--if you haven't looked at what's available, you should. You can sort by the last found date, the most recently updated boxes listings, and more. I get a lot of requests for these sorts of sort options, but they've been available for years. Different searches have different sorting options as well. The all-locations search has 13 options, but the location-based search has 15 options, while the trip planner has 16 options.

When all is said and done, the advanced search should look like this. I click search and get these results.

It looks a lot like my logbook page, so why did I bother? You get a lot more options available. If I wanted a list of only my active plants, I could have done that. If I wanted only a list of my plants in the San Luis Obispo area, I could have done that. If I wanted a list of my blue diamond boxes, I could have done that.

But let's go back to my original search for all my plants. From the search results, I can click the Map Results link, and get a neat little map of all of my plants around the globe. =)

I'm rather amused to see the clustering of boxes on the East Coast there. Looks like I was hiking the AT or something, doesn't it? Oh, wait a minute--I did! Ha! =)

Due to map limitations, I can only plot 100 distinct points on the map. I have 177 plants in my results list, so the last 77 had been cut off. If I maneuver to page 2 of the search results, however, then click the Map Results link, I can see the rest of my plants, stretching from Hawaii to Europe.

If you haven't played around with the Advanced Search page, check it out. There's lots of fun stuff in there. =)

Page 2 of my map results extends from Hawaii to Europe!

I find it rather amusing how obvious my AT thru-hike was
just by zooming into this map of my plants! =)

Layoffs in Tough Times

2010-11-03T23:21:00.000-07:00

For most people, being laid off is somewhat of an inconvenience at best. At its worst, it can be a serious financial hardship. Now if it were me, I'd cut back and only be buying things that I considered important. Keeping up a premium membership on Atlas Quest is not one of those things that I'd consider important, but I've actually had people ask if I could delay their expiring membership for a week or so until they next their next unemployment check.

And my response has been--absolutely not! By golly, I don't want money from an unemployment check! So I'd extend the premium membership for several months for free. Save your money for more important things.

So if you're unemployed or find yourself joining the ranks of the unemployed and your premium membership is about to expire, let me know. You've helped support Atlas Quest (and myself!), and I'd like to return the favor when times get tough for you. Full details can be found on the Unemployment Pool Deal page.

Calendars! Get your calendars!

2010-10-18T19:54:00.000-07:00

And they're back! The 2011 letterboxing calendars are ready! Well, almost ready.... Two important things I still need to get out of the way. The first is to announce which photos I selected for the calendars and congratulate the winners. The second... well, they're almost ready for shipping. Hopefully within the next week or two. *fingers crossed*

There are two calendars this year. The first is the official letterboxing calendar--photos by letterboxers, for letterboxes, often while letterboxing. It has important letterboxing dates such as Plant-a-Letterbox Day, Hike Naked Day, and AQ's birthday. (Just kidding about the Hike Naked Day--had you going, though, didn't I?) You can see all of the photos used, who submitted them, and where they were taken, and the quotes I put with them on Atlas Quest. Check out the letterboxing calendar now!

Second up, for those of you following Another Long Walk, you know I spent five months this year thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. What you may not realize is that I took a whopping 5,000 or so photos along the hike. Most of the, honestly, suck. But when you take that many photos, you can't help but get at least a few gems out of the bunch, and I picked some of my favorites to create the Pacific Crest Trail edition. All of these photos are my own, and it does not include the letterboxing 'holidays' since I plan to give a whole bunch of them to friends and family for Christmas. (Hope I didn't spoil anyone's Christmas present who might be reading this....) There might be a few thru-hikers I know who are interested in these calendars as well.

I've opened up the AQ Marketplace for orders, but PLEASE keep in mind that calendars are not actually ready to be mailed yet--I expect they'll be ready to ship within the next week or so, but definitely by the end of October.

If I selected one of your photos for the calendar, you'll have a free calendar coming your way. Do not include that calendar if you wish to order additional ones. AQ isn't smart enough to know you won a calendar and will charge you for anything you select through the marketplace. I'll handle your orders separately. =)

Also--more good news!--this year, the calendars are cheaper than I've ever sold them. I managed to score a pretty sweet deal with a coupon code that took 20% off my cost on the calendars on top of the bulk discount I usually get, and I'm passing those savings on down. This year, calendars are just $12, and premium members get another 10% off that price. But when the calendars run out, that's the last of the really good prices I got. I will make additional calendars available if necessary, but they will cost more.

Blog Subscriptions

2010-10-16T17:58:00.000-07:00

I subscribe to over a dozen blogs. How 'bout you? =)

If you're reading this, you're reading my blog. Duh! Most people read my blog because all new members are auto-subscribed to it. There are actually hundreds of letterboxers with blogs, however, and most of them you will not be auto-subscribed to. Those that you are subscribed to show up in the Letterboxing News widget, making it very easy to keep up with your favorite blogs.

One little annoying thing is actually trying to subscribe to a blog that interests you. You have to look up the blog from Atlas Quest then add it to your subscriptions. Wouldn't it be nice if you read someone's blog and think, "Hey, I'd like to subscribe to this!" and have a button readily available that you could click and POOF! You're subscribed. On Atlas Quest, at least.

Now, you can. But since the code to do this must be on your blog, you have to add it yourself. Go to the Manage Blogs page, and click on one of your blogs to open it. On the right side of the page is a large box with the code necessary to add a subscription link to Atlas Quest. It also shows an example of what the subscription button would look like. Add that code to your blog, and anyone visiting your blog can click it to add your blog to their list of subscriptions on Atlas Quest.

Here's an example button for the blog Wassa created of my West Coast Trail adventures:

I'm actually in a strange position where I have absolutely no desire to add the button to my own blogs. Since all new members are automatically subscribed to my blogs anyhow, there's not really any pressing need to have a subscription button. Perhaps the unsubscribe button would be more useful, but why would anyone possibly want to unsubscribe to this amazing piece of literature? ;o)

But seriously.... The button will allow people to subscribe (or unsubscribe, if the case may be) from your blog instead of requiring people to look up your blog on AQ and subscribe--a task that probably limits a lot of people from subscribing to your blog. Hopefully, this option will help change that.

Bookmark This!

2010-10-07T12:15:00.000-07:00

I don't know about the rest of you, and it absolutely astounds me that nobody has ever brought it up, but if you bookmark a post, have you ever noticed that the bookmark link never goes away on the post? In fact, even better than removing the link completely would be to turn it into an "unbookmark" link. This has annoyed me for years, but since nobody ever mentioned it or seemed to care, I figured I was better off working on other stuff that people really did care about. =)

But finally, I sat down and fixed that little annoyance. If you've bookmarked a post, the link will then show up as "unbookmark" (for lack of a better term) which allows you to take the bookmark off right there from the post.

I also must confess, I never really liked the page with all of the bookmarks either. And thinking on it, it seemed completely unnecessary. Why can't we just "search" the message boards for posts we've bookmarked? It would work just like any other search. People can choose if they want to view the simple, summary, or expanded views of their bookmarked posts, or flip between the views as necessary. So I implemented that and replaced the "My Bookmarks" page with a "search for my bookmarked posts" page.

Then I updated the Search Message Boards page with the additional search option.

In other tweaks, you have been able to search the boards for replies to your own posts for years, but that option was never reflected in the search page. It is now.

And finally, Dizzy suggested an option to allow people to search just the posts that started a thread. I don't imagine that most people would ever use this option, but it's actually a pretty simple request to implement and seems harmless enough. I bookmarked it to come back to later--someday--and today I went ahead and implemented that since I was mucking around with the message board code already. You'll now see that as a search option. Even more cool, when I pulled up the message from my list of bookmarks, I could click on the "Unbookmark" link. Now that the feature has been implemented, I don't need that post bookmarked anymore. =)

On a related note, I bookmarked a whole heck of a lot of posts during my hike. Anything I thought was interesting or deserved more thought. I've got a whole lot of bookmarks still to deal with.... someday.... =) Perhaps I'll get to a little more of them now that I found bookmarks a bit easier and faster to navigate!

Enjoy!

Helping with Help!

2010-10-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

Knowing I couldn't possibly keep up with all of the going-ons in letterboxing, I created a help page that's actually a wiki--allowing any members on Atlas Quest to add to and edit the help pages. This is great for a couple of reasons. First, I don't know everything. (It's true!) When it comes to the intricacies of postals or LTCs, I'm not an expert. Second, things change--sometimes, I don't even realize it--and therefore the documentation needs to be updated. Third, I'm my spelling is atrocious and there are often typos in anything I right that spell chekers don't necessarily katch. I'd just as soon let you guys fix it right then and there than have to e-mail me to fix a simple typa. ;o)

So a wiki seemed like just the solution. If I overlooked something, you can add it yourself. If I got something wrong, you can fix it yourself. If something changed, you can fix it yourself.

Normally, I'd try to check the list of Recent Additions and Changes at least once per month to see how things were going, answer unanswered questions, and check that people aren't adding junk to the help pages, but this also meant that cases of vandalism (which has happened on occasion) could sit unnoticed for days or weeks at a time, and people with questions may not get answers as promptly as they wanted. And while I was off hiking the PCT, I didn't check this list at all!

Surely, there must be a better way....

...and now there is! =) If you go to your Notifications & E-mail Preferences, you can now be notified whenever someone adds to or edits the help pages. Each night, just after midnight, AQ will check for additions and edits to the help pages and send you an AQ mail of the changes.

Want to help out on Atlas Quest? Sign up for this notification option! Answer new questions that people add, check that nobody is vandalizing the help pages, fix typos, add missing information, or whatever else needs to be done. Do you see the same questions being asked over and over again on the message boards? Add it to the help pages!

There's also a Wiki Help board, to discuss questions about the help pages or the information in it. Mark it as a favorite if you'd like to be informed about things that are happening in the help! =)

Updated Tags

2010-09-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

Red tag, blue tag, green tag... what do they mean? They basically represent anything you want them to represent, and I've probably heard a hundred different ways people have chosen to use their tags. The biggest problem in using them, however, is remember what one uses each tag color for!

Now, if you check out your Miscellaneous Preferences, you'll find an option to set the tag names to a more useful reminder than the color of the tag. You can label them north, south, east, or west. You can label them DNF, or with the name of the event you plan to find them at. Whatever reminds you of what the purpose of each color tag is.

Then, wherever the tag names are provided as options (such as on the Advanced Search page), you'll see the name you gave the tag rather than the color of the tag. Search results that show a box that has been tagged--you'll still see the same little stars as before, but if you hover your mouse cursor over the star, it'll show the name you gave it as a tooltip.

On a related note, back on that Advanced Search page, you'll find options to "and" or "or" tags. These only apply if you select more than one tag for your search. Let's say, for instance, you select the blue and red tag colors. You can have the search results return all boxes that have the blue and red tag, or all boxes that have the blue or red tag. It'll default to or, just as it's always been, but you do now have the option of an and search which didn't exist before.

Happy trails!

-- Ryan

Reducing the Clutter

2010-09-26T10:59:00.000-07:00

One of the most common, ongoing complaints I get about Atlas Quest is the cluttering of search results. Old, abandoned boxes that are out of date, boxes that are known (or at least strongly suspected) of being missing, but still showing up in search results. Over the years, I've made a few stabs at the problem such as fixing listings manually that come to my attention.

Then there was the period when I went through a whole series of methods of dealing with abandoned listings. First I had set up the site so others could automatically adopt them if the owner hadn't logged in for a year, but then I'd get irate e-mails from the occasional person who'd come back about their boxes being set out for adoption. Then I created an "abandoned" status so people could see at a glance that the box might have issues and the listing may not be up-to-date, but then I kept getting requests from folks asking to adopt them (which I had stopped allowing). Seems like no matter what I did with those abandoned listings (either because the owner no longer logs into Atlas Quest at all or because the owner just doesn't update the status of their boxes when they are known to go missing), someone would be up in arms about it. And yet, nobody likes those listings.

As Atlas Quest ages, it's a problem that continues to grow worse and worse.

So once again, I'm taking another stab at the problem. =) Now, if you head on over to the Advanced Search page, you'll find a few new options. Near the bottom of the page, just above the options to hide your plants, finds, and attempted boxes, there are three new options. Let me tell you about each of them....

Hide Abandoned Boxes

This option removes from the search results any box whose owner has not logged into Atlas Quest for at least six full months. The boxes may be perfectly viable, but if it isn't, there's probably nothing in the listings that would let you know. If you have trouble finding a box, sending an e-mail off to the owner probably won't get you any results. So a lot of people would just as soon not look for such boxes.

Technically, I should point out, it's actually only hiding abandoned listings on Atlas Quest--the owner may very well be maintaining their boxes and simply be regular members of letterboxing.org. (It happens quite often, in fact.) But as far as AQ can determine, the owner simply isn't around maintaining their listings on Atlas Quest. The fact that their boxes are also abandoned is just an assumption.

There are approximately 53,000 active boxes listed on Atlas Quest, and this search option would knock out about 4,000 of them from the search results. To insure your own boxes don't get "knocked out," just make sure you've logged into AQ at least once every six months. Additionally, I've decided to enable this option as a default for most traditional box searches.

Hide Strikeouts

You probably don't know what a 'strikeout' is, since I just made it up last night. =) It's what happens when you look for the box but then fail to find it. You've struck out! Some people will go so far as to record their attempt on Atlas Quest, and if you look at the history of attempts on the box, you might see a long list of failed attempts. (One particular box listing has 62 consecutive attempts on it!) Does it mean the box is missing? Not necessarily. It might mean that the box is really, really tough to find. But if there are several consecutive attempts on a box, more often than not, it's usually missing. And most people do not enjoy trying to find boxes that are likely missing.

So I took the baseball analogy here. Three strikes, and you're out! Checking this option will remove from the search results any box where the last three entries on the find report are all attempts. Setting your preferences to hide attempts does not make your boxes immune, either. If there are a lot of attempts on your box, you can't "trick" people into looking for a box that they don't want to find by hiding your attempts.

If you like a challenge, you'll want to keep those strikeouts in your search results. Since most people don't, I'm also making the default for most searches to not include strikeouts.

What if one of your boxes has three (or more) attempts but it really is active and still can be found? That's part of what maintaining your listings is about. If the box is still there, you can record a "find" on your own box and reset the strikeout counter back to zero. Everyone has the power to reset the counter to zero, and if the attempts are bogus, part of maintaining your listing is to let everyone know it.

Only 865 of the 53,000 active boxes on Atlas Quest have "struck out" as of today. (I haven't run the numbers because the database query starts getting a heck of a lot more complicated, but I suspect the great majority of these would also be from abandoned listings.)

Hide Old Finds

Many folks want some reassurance that a box is still there by checking the last found date of the box. If the box was found within the past week, the theory goes, it's much more likely to still be there than a box that was last found a year ago.

Of all the theories of reducing cluttered search results, this is the most dubious one, in my humble opinion. I know a lot of people out there subscribe to the theory, and I'm willing to help you out by giving you an option to remove from the search results any box that hasn't been found within the last six months (that's what this option does), but it is not enabled by default.

I have a lot of boxes I've planted on long hikes, and they often times don't get any finders for years at a time. I've planted boxes in Africa and Central America which rarely get any visitors, even though--so far as I know--the boxes are still alive and well. And I've planted boxes that have such cryptic and difficult clues, that few people have ever solved them. There are many legitimate reasons a box may not have any recent finds on it, so I while I'll give you the power to remove such boxes from the search results, I won't make it a default.

For those of you who do have such boxes and are worried someone might skip over it due to it having no recent finders, you can "push up" the last found date by recording a find on the box yourself. Since this option isn't a default, however, I don't think it's really worth the effort. I don't intend to record finds on all of my rarely found boxes just to update the last found date.

For a box that has no finders (yet!), the plant date is assumed to be the "last found" date. It's the last date that AQ knows somebody was at the box and can verify its existence on that date.

A whopping 31,492 boxes of the 53,000 active listings would be cut out of one's search results if you used this option. Which, IMHO, just goes to show how incredibly unreliable using the last found date is in determining if a box is still viable. But it's an option for those who want to make use of it.

Out of curiosity, I tried extending the cutoff for "recently found boxes" to one year, and that would have cut out 25,606 boxes. Extending it to two years would have cut out 12,995 boxes. It doesn't really seem to matter what the cut-off time is.... relying on the last found date would cut out a LOT of viable boxes from your search results.

So there you have it! Hope you enjoy the new options, and I hope it unclutters your search results a bit. =)

The First "Big" Update....

2010-09-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because I'm officially a dork (or geek? I'm not really sure what the difference is?), but in the last five months, I've really missed coding. The stuff that requires me to open the hood on Atlas Quest, replace parts, shake up the database, and makes me think--how can I get the system to do something it may not want to do. An idea is great, but figuring out how to make them work can be a lot of fun.

The very first changes I made to AQ since getting back were largely cosmetic in nature. Fast and easy to implement. But I really wanted to get into the guts, and now I've done so. =)

The changes aren't obvious, and most of you probably won't even care about them, but they were things that bothered me for a long time. If you go to the Advanced Search page, that's where you'll see the results of my mucking around. In particular, the stamp types and the hike types sections.

They used to be radio buttons. Now they are checkboxes. Before, you could only search one category at a time: For instance, if you wanted a list of all boxes that required a hike of three miles or more, you had to either accept "all" lengths, or you had to run two searches--one for "treks" and one for "expeditions." Now you can specifically pick both types at once. You could even throw in the boxes of "unknown lengths" in case some of those might be longer hikes as well--or not, if you think that would likely include too many false positives.

I usually skip looking for any box marked as a store-bought stamp, but I don't mind looking for the occasional custom-made stamp along with the hand-carved stamps I usually find, and now I can run a search that lets me hide those store-boughts that I'm not interested in while keeping all of the other boxes in my search results. Awesome! =)

I've also turned a couple of "admin only" features into features that everyone can now use. Once again, you can see that on the Advanced Search page--it's now possible to search for boxes that have blue diamonds and/or planter's choice icons on them. I originally used them to help test me test various algorithms. I'd tweak an algorithm, run it, then see what sorts of boxes were being assigned the blue diamonds by running a "blue diamond search." I've actually had that as an option available for admins since those features were created, but admittedly kept them "admin only" options thinking they'd likely be too controversial. They probably still are, but I don't really care anymore either. =)

When you're wandering through the woods wondering where your next good water source is and if you have enough food to get to the next trail town, you start thinking about the problems in the "real world" and start thinking, "Who the hell cares one way or another about blue diamonds? There are far more important things for me to worry about. If someone doesn't like those being options, they can jump in a frozen lake. It'll give them something else to worry about--problems that really matter."

So I've made those options available to all now. Yes, if you run searches that return only blue diamond boxes, you'll certainly miss some great boxes that don't have them. Yes, if you run searches that return only planter choice boxes, you'll also miss some great boxes that don't have them. But really, is there any method that can guarantee you'll get a list of every great box in an area without actually finding every box in the area yourself? Recommendations from friends are incomplete unless they've found every box in an area. And they might skew their results based on their own personal preferences. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

So I'll say it now--yes, you will miss some awesome boxes if you just look for boxes that have blue diamonds. But I'll say two things about that: One, who cares? I don't. That's your loss. And two, it's not possible to create a definitive list of "must find" boxes with any method. The only way to guarantee you'll find every fantastic box in an area is to actually go out and find every box in the area. And when we're traveling, that's rarely a realistic option. A blue diamond list may not be perfect, but neither is any other list. At least it gives you a starting point, though.

And finally one other tweak--many moons ago, when I was testing code that was specific to where clues were hosted, I'd find it useful to search based on where clues were hosted as test cases. So I made an admin-only option that let me search based on if a clue were hosted on Atlas Quest, LbNA, or some other remote website. It would even show an icon in the list of attributes to let me know where the clue came from. (Those icons would always show up in my printouts of clues, and I always wondered if anyone noticed the "extra" icons that would show up in my printouts, but if anyone did, they never said anything about it.) It was mostly a feature I used for testing. The only practical use I could think of that you all might use it for would be to run a search that suppressed LbNA-hosted clues if you were planning to check for clues on that website anyway. It would reduce the redundancy of seeing those particular boxes on both sites. But it would likely "look bad" to provide an option that would let people suppress LbNA-hosted clues on searches here, even if the point was to encourage people to get a full list of LbNA-hosted clues at LbNA.

I've also found that I rarely ended up using that search option--if I needed to find a box with clues hosted on LbNA, for instance, I'd just run a simple search then scroll down the attribute list looking for one marked appropriately. Seemed a bit laborious to actually run an advanced search.

So I took that option out from the search options--makes the code shorter and easier--but I left the icons intact and they're now available for everyone to see. If you run a search, it'll show an icon indicating where the clue is hosted--Atlas Quest, LbNA, or "some other remotely hosted clue"--before you click or even hover your mouse cursor over the link. Then I added additional ones for kicks--there are now icons for clues hosted on the geocaching.com website and for those hosted on Blogger. Again, the ability to search based on where a clue is hosted is not an option, but you can see at a glance where the clue is hosted.

Which can be useful for a couple of reasons. You might see that a clue is hosted on geocaching.com and might naturally think it's a hybrid box--and perhaps not one you'd like to get.

Another possible use: AQ often uses cached clues for some features like the ability to print several clues at once--but this often doesn't work well with Blogger-hosted clues (which are often photo clues, and photos aren't cached) or other remotely-hosted clues. If you see one of those in your list, it might be a good idea to take a special look at the clue before printing a cached version of it. (I knowingly walked passed one letterbox on the PCT when the clue stated to find the location where the photo was taken... but my clue didn't have the photo attached! Argh!)

And, just because I could, I added one special icon for any clue that I've hosted on my Ryan's a Total Goober website. Which right now, amounts to just one clue. I usually host my clues on AQ, but one particular clue I needed to do some advanced HTML that wasn't permitted on AQ. It's not really useful in this particular case, but it's one of the perks of running your own website. =)

If you run a search for New York, NY, for instance (at least with my search results), you'll see icons representing AQ-hosted clues, LbNA-hosted clues, two Blogger-hosted clues, and four "other remote clues." Just click on the icon to open up the clue page.

So there you have it.... some of the updates I just installed about an hour ago. Enjoy! =) I mucked with the code. I mucked with the database. I probably broke some stuff and don't even know it yet. If you see any problems, do let me know!

And aren't you'll glad I'm back? =)

-- Ryan

It's that time of year again....

2010-09-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

What time of year is that, you ask? Calendars! Actually, I'm a little late this year. I've been... preoccupied with other issues. ;o) But now that that little project is over and I'm back online, it's time to make the 2011 letterboxing calendar. It's not too late to submit your photos for selection! Get your photos submitted ASAP, however. I plan to select the final winners within the next few days and start putting the calendar together! I don't have a specific cut-off date or time in mind, but it'll be soon.

Project X: Letterboxing Calendar
Sample the 2010 Calendars
Upload Your Submissions

Clues on the Trail

2010-04-26T23:12:00.000-07:00

As most of you know, I'm currently thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. This activity often holds one special challenge for me--getting clues. I can check e-mail, but I can't necessarily get on the Internet. I really needed a way to get clues to me via e-mail.

So, while Amanda is here to slackpack me, I've been working on a new feature late into the nights. Admittedly, it's largely for selfish purposes, but for those of you who also have e-mailing ability on your cell phone but don't necessarily have access to Atlas Quest on the Internet--or maybe you don't have an easy way to store clues on your device--this feature might be very useful for you. =)

To make it work, send an e-mail to 'boxes' at 'atlasquest.com' including the location you want letterbox clues for as the subject. It's just a normal run-of-the-mill location-based search, so anything that works for a location based search works here--cities, intersections, addresses, zip codes, and so forth. Leave the body of the message blank. (Or you can write stuff in it, but AQ will ignore anything you write.)

After a minute or two, you should get a reply with the clues for that location. If the e-mail address is one that is registered with Atlas Quest, it will also strip out clues for boxes you've planted and already found.

You have mail! =)

Is it art? Or graffiti?

2010-04-16T22:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening, I went on my normal Alki walk. It was a nice night out. Wonderful views of Puget Sound. And about halfway along my walk, I found two characters "decorating" a truck. I've seen vehicles hit with TP and stuff written on the windows before, but at a glance, I could tell this was something special. The two guys had an enormous roll of plastic wrap and were just starting to wrap the car. And looking into the cab of the truck, I could see it filled with packing peanuts. Right up to the windows.

That was evil. But when I took a closer look, I was even more impressed. They lined the inside of everything in the truck with aluminum foil. The steering wheel, the seats, the head rests on the seats, the review mirror--everything covered with aluminum foil. How long this must have taken I can't imagine. The packing peanuts was pure evil. Whoever owns that truck will likely be finding those for months on end.

And I decided, I needed photos. This was a work of art. This is something I would have normally guessed was Wassa's work, except I know Wassa, and neither of the two men doing this was him. I asked what unspeakable crime the owner of the truck committed, and was told he was getting married. The fool. *shaking head*

I wanted photos, but I didn't have my camera on me. Curses! I walked home.

This Alki walk is a good five or so miles in length, and after getting home, I sat around for a couple of hours getting some work done and letting my feet rest. But I still wanted photos, and I didn't know when the owner of that truck would be back and start the cleanup. I needed to get pictures that night. So I grabbed a camera, and at 2:00 in the morning, I went off to take photo.

These are the best photos that came out. The flash was blinding, and the natural light at 3:00 in the morning was less than ideal. However, you can see the packing peanuts in the vehicle, half covering the steering wheel (which itself was wrapped with aluminum foil). I walked back home and went to sleep.

I wanted to see if I could get better photos, however, so I did my walk a third time in the light of day the next morning, hoping none of the cleanup had started. And YES! It was still there, completely untouched!

I'm not really sure the photos from the light of day were any better. The glare of the sun caused its own problems, and I actually had to touch up these photos in my photo-editing software to make them look this good!

I really like the aluminum foil trim on the tires of the truck. That just seems classy to me.

Then I posted a note on the car saying, "The letterbox can be found in the peanuts." No idea if the owner will understand that message, but the mystery will certainly intrigue him. =)

Virtuals Revisited

2010-04-13T20:52:00.000-07:00

When I first saw virtuals, I didn't really get the appeal. Until one.... there was one virtual that I positively thrilled myself solving. It's simple--practically mindless, in fact--but I absolutely loved it. It's called the Peatbank. If you've never been interested in virtuals, it's at least worth keeping your mind open for this one. It's different. I'm not sure who created it, except that it was an Englishman (or woman), and it was rather unfortunate this type of virtual didn't get 'exported' into the United States like their real letterboxes had been. This virtual made the hunt for a virtual box as much like the real thing as possible on thing contraption we call the Internet.

So far as I know, only one attempt was ever done to recreate the spirit of that original Dartmoor virtual box, Lone R's Northern Village. It was a supremely satisfying change of pace of the usual virtuals being posted and I hoped it would inspire others, but apparently... it didn't. *shrug*

But that's the kind of virtual I actually get excited about, and finally, I set up a system that makes it a heck of a lot easier for me to list that type of virtual myself. For those of you paying attention to recent virtuals, you'll have noticed a positive blizzard of these types of boxes. I probably created more in the last few days than have ever existed, and each one I listed tested some of the code behind it. Tweak some more, listed another one, tweak some more, list another one.

It started with The Seychelles, a place Amanda has always wanted to visit. But I also imagined ways to letterbox virtually that we could never do in real life, such as in space or underwater, or even find a true "micro" box. I have some other ideas for virtuals I'd like to create, but I'll save those as surprises.

The code for listing these types of virtuals seems pretty solid now, so the feature has been opened for anyone and everyone who would like to give their hand at it. Seems like a lot of you have been enjoying these virtuals I've listed over the last few days, but I'd like to enjoy solving a few that others have listed! The process for creating them is still considerably more complicated than the usual state of using passkeys, but it does take out a lot of grunt work that would have been required before which is why the most time consuming part to create these virtuals was carving the stamp--not setting up the HTML which used to be the biggest bottleneck.

Look for a lot more of these in the future! If you're interested in solving these, be sure to join the Virtuals group. Otherwise, the virtual functionality is largely hidden.

Did you miss the mustache during all the shenanigans?

2010-04-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

With all the shenanigans going on lately, from Apollo Quest and random themes to alleged marriages going on and suspect dentist visits (okay, the dentist visit was real), real development for Atlas Quest has not come to a completely stand still. It just seems that way. And, so far, it seems like nobody has noticed on a couple of the newest features.

First, there's that suspicious mustache icon. I added this over a week ago, and at least a few people have noticed it since I see it used in about a dozen entries. But I'm a little surprised that nobody has yet to comment on it on the message boards. This icon can be applied to any event box that's Hidden In Plain Sight (HIPS), if you want to give people a head's up to keep their eyes open. Kuku and Wassa (and Wassa friends) were the inspiration for this icon. Kuku e-mailed me a question about how to list a HIPS box, and technically speaking, there wasn't any way to list them, but it seemed like it could be a useful icon for event boxes.

I wasn't sure what kind of icon could represent a HIPS box, however, so I scratched my head a bit thinking about all those sneaky HIPS boxes I've found in the past--hidden in fake cans, hollowed out books, in otherwise empty donut boxes, and such. Leave something unusual on a picnic table at an event--such as a rock. A solid piece of granite. Just put it on a picnic table and watch what happens. Admire the dozens of people that will pick up the rock, look under the rock, knock the rock around. They're convinced it's a hidden event stamp, and they'll spend ten minutes trying to figure out The Secret of the Rock. Even when there is no secret! That's how powerful these HIPS boxes are. They turn sane people into those crazy people you'll cross the street to avoid.

Of course, when I start thinking about sneaky and conniving, I start remembering the fun from the Spy vs. Spy event. And when I start thinking about that event, I start remember the ridiculous fake mustaches Wassa's team wore. And I thought, "Ha-ha!" THAT can be the icon for a HIPS box! Wassa's mustache! And thus, he unwittingly became the inspiration for the icon. Remember that the next time you see the icon. ;o)

In a completely unrelated update, there's yet another new search option I call the Linear Path Search, which is a really ugly name to describe a search along the straight line from Point A to Point B. It's a lot like the Trip Planner search that allows you to search for all boxes within a specified distance of a specific route, though in this case, you get to the pick the starting and ending points for anywhere on Earth. And, it'll only work with straight lines. So if you're traveling along an Interstate, you're still probably better off running a Trip Planner search. If you're traveling off the beaten path, however, or live in Canada or Europe where there is no trip planner support (as of yet, at least), the linear path search can recreate a lot of that functionality.

Take this example of a 5-mile wide search from Sacramento to Seattle. (Technically speaking, the search is for all boxes within 5 miles of the line from Sacramento to Seattle, so it's actuall 10-miles wide--5 miles for each side of the line.) Each box shows how far down that line the box is located, and how far off from the line the box is located. And check out the mapped results--pretty slick-looking, don't you think?

For long distances such as this, it's probably not that helpful since most roads won't be anywhere near straight enough to follow a straight-line route, but broken into shorter segments, it could prove to be a very useful search. Any point on Earth can be mapped--addresses, cities, zip codes, latitude and longitude coordinates, and more. Anything you can search for using a location-based search will work as points for the linear path search.

Happy trails!

Nevermind....

2010-04-02T00:01:00.001-07:00

That whole thing about changing the name of Atlas Quest? The deal fell through, so nevermind about all that. We'll be keeping the domain atlasquest.com until a legitimate offer comes along. *rolling eyes* My bad!

Apollo Quest!

2010-03-31T23:22:00.000-07:00

They say everyone has their price, and I'm no exception. Perhaps if I were independently wealthy, I'd be less corruptible, and while I'm wealthy in friends and experiences, it's hard to buy food or pay for the dentist with those. (Speaking of which, I have a dentist appointment tomorrow. *sigh*)

Occasionally, I get requests to buy the domain atlasquest.com -- it's a gem of a domain name, as it turns out. When I started Atlas Quest, a google search brought up precisely zero pages that used those two words, one right after the other, and I was delighted to find the domain available for purchase. It only took a few months before I got my first offer from someone to buy the domain from me, but the offer was for about fifty bucks and hardly worth the effort. It wasn't even a company that intended to use the domain--they just wanted to "flip" the domain and sell it to the highest bidder.

Every few months, I still get one of those offers, and I've always ignored them.... until now. It seems that a World of Warcraft (WOW) has some sort of extension or something (I don't really get it myself since I don't play) that they call AtlasQuest (or AQ, for short). Notice the lack of a space between Atlas and Quest. Not exactly the same way I spell it, but close enough. I first noticed them a few years ago and found it mildly amusing at the time.

The latest offer I got was from them. At first I blew them off, like I've always done, but apparently they really want that domain name in a bad way. And apparently, making games is a heck of a lot more profitable than letterboxing is, because they offered me--well, it seems wrong to mention specifics, but their offer had five digits (and that's not including the pennies) WHAT?! "I'll think about it," I told them. What was really going through my head was, "Hell, YES!" Sure, I'd need a new domain for Atlas Quest, but a rose by any other name is still a rose, and Atlas Quest by any other name is still Atlas Quest. For that much money, I'll be happy to use a new domain!

So negotiations ensued. First, I needed a new domain, and finally settled on Apollo Quest. This has a couple of benefits. First, I can still sell the AQ patches I have. Thankfully, I had only used the AQ abbreviation on the patches, so all of the ones I've already sold will not become obsolete. Second, it still keeps the "spirit" of the original name, switching out one character from Greek mythology for another. And, it's still easy enough for people to spell. (A lot of those creatures from Greek mythology have bizarre names that are very difficult for most people to spell or even pronounce!)

Unfortunately, the domain apolloquest.com is owned by one of those domain flipper companies, so I needed to negotiate with them to get the new domain. (They were trying to sell it for $1,200, but I got them to agree to less. Still highway robbery if you ask me, but who am I to complain--I'm selling mine for tens of thousands of dollars!) It'll take about a week before that domain is officially transferred into my name and the IP address is fully propagated, but it's in the works.

Once I get the apolloquest.com domain name and it's all official, I'll move Atlas Quest to the new location, then start redirecting traffic that does go to atlasquest.com to apolloquest.com. I'll keep atlasquest.com through the end of April so people have plenty of time to learn about the new domain name and have time to adjust links on their own websites as necessary.

The first day of May, I'll start the process of transferring the atlasquest.com domain to AtlasQuest (without the space). I don't know how long it'll take them before they actually get their own website set up since that's not in my control, but any link that points to atlasquest.com will likely break at some point during that first week of May.

And that's it. Except for the name, absolutely nothing else will be changing. Marjorie will still be our chick of choice, wassa will still be a webmaster, and cheese racing will still be allowed at letterboxing events.

And welcome to Apollo Quest!

The Virtual Demotion

2010-03-27T00:32:00.000-07:00

I haven't been looking forward to this latest update because I know it's going to tick a lot of people off, so let me apologize in advance. Virtual 'boxes' have long since lost any connection to boxes as we know it, and I've finally reflected that fact in the database and the code base. In a nutshell, they've been demoted. They are no longer boxes, in name or function.

For a long time, I didn't care that virtuals (in my opinion, at least) were being run into the ground. I didn't do them, so I didn't really care. Whatever floats your boat. =) Eventually, however, their proliferation started causing a couple of technical problems that made me sit up and take notice. The two big issues:

* The enormous number of photos being uploaded into the system were taking up an incredibly large amount of limited disk space. I did a couple of delaying tactic, such as deleting decorative photos that were included with clues and limiting listings for virtuals to one person per day. Those were just stall tactics, though, not permanent solutions.
* Because it's actually quite easy to solve all (or nearly all) virtuals, it had some unique issues when it came to developing database queries. For those who had found more than about 50% of the virtuals listed on Atlas Quest, it caused an excessive number of slow database queries. Since the other types of boxes didn't have those kind of find rates (nor the sheer number of finds involved), the problem doesn't show up with other box types. It was a problem unique to virtuals, and I didn't have a good solution to it.

To be perfectly honest, I'd be just as happy to stop support for virtuals completely, but I know quite a few of you are big fans of them, so I haven't. I thought about moving them to a completely separate website, which is actually quite an appealing idea to me, but creating a new website from scratch would take a lot more work than I wanted to handle. So I went with the solution that I'd move virtuals into a category of their own, completely independent of boxes, trackers, events, and groups (which were the four official "categories" of "stuff" I supported before). Now there's an actual virtual category, rather than just a subtype of the box category.

This change has several important ramifications. I'm building this code from scratch, so it's rather primitive at the moment. A lot of features that were designed to work explicitly with boxes such as tags, ignored boxes, box comments, and so forth--they don't work on virtuals anymore. That's the bad news. Eventually, I'd like to implement some of those features, but it takes time, and it's not going to happen overnight.

Of course, to support virtuals at all, I really needed solutions to those two big elephants in the room, and a number of changes are directly related to fixing those problems. The first--images for solutions will no longer be hosted on Atlas Quest. Instead of uploading images, you'll just create links to images elsewhere on the web. (And no, uploading images to the Photo Gallery and linking to those will not work--AQ will reject those links.) Existing images can stay on Atlas Quest, but all new virtuals will require externally hosted images. This should help cut the number of images being uploaded dramatically.

The slow queries problem I've attempted to help solve by reducing the number of tables in the database that need to be joined. Most of you are probably rolling your eyes thinking, "What's that mean?" What this means is that series of virtuals will no longer be supported. (Existing series have been split up into individual listings.) Since almost all virtuals had clues and solutions hosted on Atlas Quest anyhow, I've gone ahead and made that an official rule. All virtuals listed on Atlas Quest must have a clue and solution listed. (Any existing boxes that did not have a clue or solution listed have had their status changed to unavailable.)

While I'm certain that a lot of these changes won't be popular, there are a couple of silver linings for you virtual aficionados. =) Since the original concept of solving passkeys one letter at a time has largely gone extinct, you can now just type the passkey rather than set it one letter at a time. (Which, truth be told, is actually easier for me to implement and maintain anyhow.)

Additionally, now that virtuals are in their own separate category, I got rid of stuff that wasn't particularly applicable to them. For instance, a planter, author, owner, and carver seemed a bit of overkill for a virtual box. Has there ever been a planter who wasn't the author? And the vast majority of virtuals were images stolen off the web so listing carvers doesn't seem particularly necessary. (And even if someone is using hand-carved stamps, would you actually be using someone else's hand-carved images? Probably not a good idea....) So there are only two names associated with virtuals--the person who first listed the box (the "creator") and the person who maintains the box (the "owner").

Likewise, the status options have been simplified as well to two different choices as well--active and unavailable. While technically, I suppose the "unknown" option could be used, it seems almost ridiculous to apply it to a virtual. And the distinction between an "unavailable" virtual and a "retired" virtual seemed like a line so thin, it hardly seems worth quibbling about. So the status options have been narrowed down to a format more suitable for virtuals. Plant dates are no longer used at all--it should always be the same as the list date--so it seemed like an unnecessary redundancy to support both a plant and list date. You don't even have the option of entering it anymore.

And there's one other relatively minor change which, I suspect, might possibly anger people most of all--you will not find your virtual plant or find counts anywhere on Atlas Quest. I suspect that part of the reason that virtuals have gone downhill over the years is that it was easy to list and find virtuals faster and faster and people could rack up large numbers very quickly. Had more effort been put into quality rather than quantity, I might never have needed to demote the virtual. If you want to keep score for yourself, that's fine, but you won't find a virtual Hall of Fame anymore, and your virtual counts will not be displayed in your profile. We've always said it shouldn't be about the numbers, and now it's not--in both words and actions. (I will admit, part of the reason for this change is that it takes the database a really long time to count up the tens of thousands of finds some of you folks have picked up. But I like the principle behind the change as well.)

For the most part, virtuals are completely hidden unless someone explicitly chooses to participate in them by joining the Virtuals group. I've already added anyone who has solved or listed virtuals in the past, so most of you shouldn't need to worry about this. (I've also included it as a Miscellaneous Preference.) The virtuals board has also been moved into this group as well. If you are a member of this group, you'll see a "Virtuals" link under the "My Page" menubar option, and that's your link to all things virtual.

And, all of the code related to virtuals is completely new. I've done quite a bit of testing on it, but there is a LOT of new code being used, and it's almost certainly going to have a lot of bugs in it. Please be patient with me--I'll fix them as quick as I can.

I think that covers most of the issues regarding virtuals. If you have any questions or comments, please post them to the Virtuals board. If you just want to chew me out for these changes, I'd rather you not--it's unlikely to do any good--but I suppose you can do that too.

Now Aren't I Clever? =)

2010-03-20T01:20:00.000-07:00

I know some of you stay up all night, just wondering, "What is Ryan doing?" Well, let me tell you about some of the exciting things I've managed to complete tonight.

Ever since I set up Another Long Walk on Blogger as a "custom domain"--that is, it points to my own domain name rather than a generic name that looks like http://mysubdomain.blogspot.com--I've wondered if I could get the rest of my blogs off of blogspot.com hell. Okay, maybe hell is too strong a word, but whenever I see a blog that uses that as the domain, I think it looks just a little bit tacky. Like wearing a thong to Taco Bell. There's just something that says, "I'm cool," by hosting one's thoughts on your very own domain name. Domain names are cheap--I get mine from GoDaddy for about ten bucks each per year. Less than a dollar per month. All thing considered, it's a cheap way to look somewhat professional on the Internet.

I've been using http://atlasquest.blogspot.com for my letterboxing blog, which works, but like I said, I think it looks tacky. I could have moved it to one of the many atlasquest.XYZ domain names I do own--atlasquest.biz, atlasquest.org, atlasquest.mobi, and probably a few others I've forgotten off the top of my head, but those aren't atlasquest.COM! It's just not the same....

So I've left it at http://atlasquest.blogspot.com all this time... until now! While figuring out how to host my Another Long Walk blog at http://www.anotherlongwalk.com, it seemed like I could tweak the directions a bit to have my blog point to http://blog.atlasquest.com. I wouldn't use www since that's used for the main Atlas Quest website, but wouldn't it be slick if my letterboxing blog were hosted at http://blog.atlasquest.com? Yeah, I thought so too.

But I was scared to make any changes to the DNS settings. If I screwed something up, it could take AQ down for days! DNS settings are not my forte, and they're awfully temperamental. Since DNS entries propagate through the Internet relatively slowly, even if I fixed the error quickly, the incorrect entries could linger for days in some systems making AQ all but inaccessible during that time.

But I really, really wanted to use http://blog.atlasquest.com, so I decided to test changing the DNS settings with a website that wasn't mission critical--my RyansATotalGoober.com website. I tweaked some DNS settings to redirect the blog to blog.ryansatotalgoober.com, and.... it didn't work. Took me the better part of a half hour, but finally figured out that a missing period was causing the trouble and got the changes to take. (However, depending on how much that DNS setting propagated, some people might see an error if they try that URL at the moment.)

Now that I knew the correct way to set DNS settings, however, I decided to try it with the real blog on a real domain--atlasquest.com. I added the CNAME setting, pointed blog.atlasquest.com to ghs.google.com, crossed my fingers, and clicked "Save Changes."

Then I logged into Blogger and told it to change my blog into a custom domain, pointing to blog.atlasquest.com, crossed the rest of my fingers, and clicked the button to save changes. I got a message saying the changes were saved and my blog was successfully moved.

I went to http://blog.atlasquest.com.... and it worked! There was the blog! This blog! Woo-who! The old location at http://atlasquest.blogspot.com will redirect to the new location. And now the blog is hosted within the atlasquest.com domain name. Sweet. The best of both worlds. =) The blog is actually hosted on Google's web servers--I basically just direct any traffic to the blog to Google to handle as needed. All other traffic stays on my own server.

Then I went into Atlas Quest to update my blog settings to the new location. The setup was complete. My job was done. =)

Disaster Planning

2010-02-28T22:10:00.000-08:00

I got an AQ mail yesterday from someone concerned about disaster planning on Atlas Quest. What would happen if "the tortuga loses his shell" or "just decides to throw in the logbook." The question might seem impolite, but it's a good question, and it's not something I talk about often.

My "throwing in the logbook" isn't very likely. Frankly, this is the best job EVER, in my humble opinion, and since I'm not independently wealthy, I do need a source of income. While it's possible I might spend less time developing or improving Atlas Quest in the future, I have absolutely NO incentive to throw in the towel. Even if I found full-time employment working 9 to 5 at a corporate job, I could still keep AQ running with a very small amount of effort. Development of new features would probably grind to a complete stop, but the site would certainly keep on kicking. =)

More likely risks could include legal woes. What if some idiot hurts themselves, then decides to sue me? It might not be fair, but it could happen. In fact, anyone that plants a letterbox could, in theory, be at risk of legal woes when things go wrong. Anyone getting hurt might blame the person who planted the box, or what if it's mistaken as something dangerous and police and bomb squads are called out? Legal woes have put businesses out of business in the past, and I suppose, in theory, it could do the same to Atlas Quest. That would most likely be a slow-motion disaster, however. The legal system isn't known for working quickly, and it seems unlikely that I'd be forced to shut down Atlas Quest quickly or unexpectedly. Heck, even Napster found a second life after being shut down.

And the biggest risk of all--which will happen someday--is if something were to happen to me. Death, dismemberment, severe strokes, or any other countless number of possibilities could take me offline permanently. Short term, nothing much will happen. If I walked away from Atlas Quest today, it could be several days before anyone even noticed. The site could probably run for several weeks completely by itself without any trouble. To keep Atlas Quest running, basically three things have to be done:

1. Someone needs to make sure to renew the domain name every year.
2. Someone needs to make sure to pay the website hosting fees when necessary. (It's currently set where I pay those costs every six months.)
3. Someone needs to keep an eye on announcements from the web hosting provider and Atlas Quest about changes to the system that might affect the continued running of the website.

Wassa already does that third task when I'm off hiking. It rarely amounts to much. A couple of years back, I was forced to move Atlas Quest to a new IP address which caused some problems. Right now I'm getting nightly notifications about the site running out of disk space, so I try to figure out ways to cut the amount of disk space being used or pay up for more. So Wassa could step into that roll pretty much immediately. In fact, I sometimes think he's actually looking forward to the day. ;o)

The ownership of Atlas Quest.... seeing as Amanda and I aren't married, I think legally speaking, the website would be inherited by my mother. I know she'd have absolutely no interest in running the website, however, and would happily give Amanda control over it. Which, seeing as Amanda is a letterboxer, uses the website regularly, and has been very supportive of it, makes a heck of a lot of sense. =) I should probably draw up a will stating as much, but admittedly, I haven't. (Not yet, at least.)

Unfortunately, Amanda doesn't have the skills necessary to actually run the website herself. I would think Amanda and Wassa would need to work out some sort of agreement about keeping the site up. Since Atlas Quest actually IS profitable, there's certainly a financial incentive to at least keep the website running, even if active development comes to a screeching halt. I doubt Wassa could make it a full-time job like I do--he probably has more bills than I do that involve things like kids, college, mortgages, and such that I don't have to worry about--and while AQ is profitable, a corporate job is even more profitable. So I don't imagine him quitting his day job to work on AQ full time. Nor anyone else for that matter. Any additional development would largely be on a volunteer basis.

Ultimately, I'd be thrilled if Atlas Quest earned enough money to pay competitive wages so that it would be easy to find someone who could continue working on Atlas Quest as a full time job. It might still get there someday. Even in this terrible economy, Atlas Quest actually has earned about 20% more in 2009 than it did in 2008. It's a little too early to tell how 2010 will do. January was down year-over-year, but February was up. *shrug* I'd be absolutely thrilled if it earned enough to pay a competitive wage compared to working "for the man." If it did, someone like Wassa could very well take over and make this a full-time job for themselves. Until then, it'll largely end up being run on a volunteer, part-time basis.

Of course, Wassa is older than me. Statistically, the stifling air quality in San Jose is likely to kill him before the sweat ocean breezes in West Seattle kill me. =) I may need a different plan B someday. I'd pick someone younger than me, but--would you believe it--there actually aren't that many who are. I'm generally considered a youngster by most people's standards. As I get older, though, it'll become easier and easier to find people younger than me qualified to keep Atlas Quest running. =) Ideally, I want whoever takes over from me to be able to keep things running for at least a decade after I'm gone, and then whoever steps into their shoes would be in charge for at least another decade after they're gone, and so forth.

While I'm not exactly sure what sort of agreement Amanda and Wassa would work out to keep Atlas Quest running, I have little doubt about it happening. They both love using the site and would want it to keep running long after I'm gone.

One other disaster that could potentially hit Atlas Quest--data loss. It's possible that the database could become corrupted and there's a permanent loss of data. There are night backups that are stored offsite, so if something did happen, it likely wouldn't be a total loss of data. I'd just go to the backups. And there are multiple backups. If the last one doesn't work, I'd try the one before it. Or the one before that. Or the one on my flash drive. There are so many different backups stored in so many different places, a complete loss of data is darned near impossible. Depending on when things go wrong, it's unlikely more than the last day or two worth of data is permanently lost. If a hacker managed to get in and deliberately destroy data, they could possibly cause a permanent loss of data that might add up to a month or two. And it might take several days, perhaps even a week for me to restore the last backup depending on the situation.

So that's my disaster plan. It's rather an informal one, but Atlas Quest is still small and informal enough that an informal disaster plan seems sufficient. As Atlas Quest grows, there might be changes. As time passes, there will be changes. But as things are now, I see no reason why AQ can't continue being here for years to come, regardless of whether or not I'm in the driver's seat.

Happy trails!

It's Just One Little Button....

2010-02-27T21:37:00.000-08:00

If you've been to a letterboxing event recently, you've probably noticed that convenient little button that allows you to record the finds for all of the personal travelers and event boxes that attend an event. There's a similar button for LTC swaps, so you can record the finding of large number of boxes from one easy and convenient page.

This is another of those examples of a feature that never seems to end. First, people requested the ability to leave a comment with each of the boxes they found. It's a reasonable idea, and I actually did implement that for the LTC swaps. Only 'private' comments are allowed, though. And as soon as I did implement that, the next feature request started coming in--"I want to post my comments publicly."

Again, it's a reasonable request, and one I want to implement, but it turns out the process is remarkable hard to implement. "It's just one little button," I'm told, "how can that possibly be hard? Public or private. Seems pretty simple to me."

This morning, I started working on this "simple" little request. About 12 hours ago. And I'm still nowhere near to being done. How can something so simple be so hard?

Options. Preferences. Notifications. As the finder of a box, you want the option to have a comment posted publicly or private. Each individual owner of the box wants the option to completely reject public comments, moderate comments, or auto-approve comments.

So already, we now have six possible combination of options that all need to work:

You: Public - Them: auto-approve
You: Public - Them: moderate
You: Public - Them: reject
You: Private - Them: auto-approve
You: Private - Them moderate
You: Private - Them reject

It's like a little battle--your options vs their options, and the lowest common denominator wins. If you want it private, the comments will be private. If you want them public, it will either be auto-approved, moderated, or forced to be private.

But since you're recording the finds and making comments on large numbers of boxes, the each box has a different set of "their" options. You might want all of your comments to be public, but some people will want the comments auto-approved, some will want them moderated, and some of them will force it to be private. So I have to check each of the options for each box you leave a comment on.

How do I display this form? Do I tell you each person's individual settings so you know what will become of your comment--auto-approved, moderated, or rejected? Or just figure it out in the background and not confuse people with all that information.

And what if you leave some comments that you want public and others that you want private. Should I have a public/private option for every single box listed, or just one setting at the top of the page that will be applied to all of the comments?

Once all that is figured out, AQ needs to send out notifications to the interested parties. Some people want to be notified of all finds, even if no comment is left. Some people only want to be notified if there's a comment included. So AQ needs to look up the author, planter, owner, all carvers, and all contacts for each box you found--regardless of whether or not you left a comment--and AQ mail all of them (if you left a comment) or some of them (if you did not leave a comment).

It's enough to make my spin. It's spinning right now, in fact. =)

And, if I don't write the code well, it could cause the find report to generate hundreds or even thousands of hits on the database, causing the submission to appear "stalled," which might cause someone to submit the form again--just in case--making the problem worse and generating multiple notifications and comments for the same box.

So when I first created that "record finds" page, I took the easy way out. You could record finds, but no comments. At the time, comments didn't really seem that important anyhow. We're talking about personal travelers, event boxes, and LTCs. Typically, they consist of messages like, "That's a great stamp!" or "Thanks for the LTC!" or maybe "I really enjoyed meeting you at the event!" It's not really particularly useful information. Compare to the types of comments you might see on a traditional boxes such as "The logbook is full and needs to be replaced" or "The stamp is missing." That's the sort of information future finders of the box may very well want to know. It's a source of information, rather than the complimentary salutations of the non-traditional boxes.

So I took the easy way out. I just didn't support comments on those pages.

Eventually, I added comments to the LTC swap, but only allowed private ones. That was remarkably hard to do in itself, so I wasn't especially excited about the prospects of doing the same for the event finds. But even that still doesn't reach the ideal that everyone really wants to see--comments, with the option to make them public or private.

But this morning, I woke up, and was determined to get this ideal done today. Ate some breakfast, then got to work. Stopped long enough to eat some cold pizza from the frig for lunch. I'm at my mom's house and she made spaghetti for dinner (and cookies for dessert!). But otherwise, I've been working. Working. Working....

And twelve hours later, I'm nowhere close to being done. Things are so wrecked on my development machine, I don't dare upload any minor bug fixes or tweaks since there might be code that's no longer compatible with all of the other code currently on the live site.

I'll get through it--eventually. I decided to go with the "simplified form" where you specify the private/public option that is applied to all of the comments you make rather than allowing you to pick them on a case-by-case basis. I figure if you really wanted to make some comments public and some private, you'd just use the Record Finds page twice--one for each option.

And I have finally managed to get that unwieldy beast partly under control--the comments are being correctly logged and stored into the database. The part that still does not work is the notifications. I've been thinking about possibly making some shortcuts there. Maybe I could just notify the owner, rather than all "interested" parties? That would certainly make some things a lot easier. I'm rather dissatisfied with the AQ mail notifications of box comments as it is, and wonder if I should create a "Box Comments" page that allows you to review the comments on all of your boxes at once, allowing you to delete or approve them as necessary. Link to that and be done with it. I could even make a list of "Recent Finds on My Boxes" that people can link to, and stop sending AQ mail notifications for finds without comments. If you want to see who's found your boxes, you'd still be able to look it up easily. And then I when a comment isn't left, I don't have to figure out which "interested parties" should get the notification and which ones should not.

But the I think, "But a lot of people won't like that." No, they won't. They like being notified every single time someone finds one of their boxes. Immediately. Even if there's no comment with it. It's purely selfish motives that make me think this way. "It's easier to code. It's easier to maintain. It gives me more time to play FarmVille." (I'm just kidding on that last one--after I reached level 70, I rarely get on FarmVille anymore.)

Anyhow, if you've ever wondered why I didn't do something so "obvious" as allowing people to leave comments on those pages of mass find recordings, that's the reason. It's hard! Brain-numbing hard. I figure I've already committed too far to stop now, so I'll carry through with something. It may not be perfect, and it may take several more days of work, and it might make me cry, but eventually I'll get something done. It may not be everything you want, but hopefully it'll be better than before. Options and preferences really muck up a lot of otherwise beautiful code.

I'm sometimes rather resistant to adding new options and preferences, and that's largely the reason. It makes things more complicated. Unless a sizable number of folks are actually going to use a certain preference, I often don't consider the effort involved worth the headache.

In somewhat related-but-not-really news, I started reading a book yesterday called Don't Make Me Think. Seems strange that I'd end up doing so much thinking today.

And in completely unrelated news.... I've heard nobody complain about the "shadows" on Atlas Quest bothering anyone today. Is that because I toned down the shadows, or because y'all got tired of complaining about the shadows? =)

Psst! Need a stamp?

2010-02-22T23:49:00.000-08:00

I know where you can get one.... the Stamp Exchange! If you need a stamp for a letterbox or got a little too carried away carving stamps and have more than you can plant, list your stamp requests and offers on the Stamp Exchange. Premium members have been kind enough to kick the tires and list a few entries to get things started, but it's now open for the rest of the world. =)

You can find a permanent link for the stamp exchange under the 'Toolbox' menubar button.

Enjoy! *hitting hat*