Individual Iteration 3

I spent quite a bit of time on Iteration 3. I posted it here. It's not exactly what I wanted, but I had to make some compromises because I couldn't figure out how to get it work the way I wanted it to, and I was running out of time. It was pretty frustrating, but I think I'm happy with the way it ended up.

The way I wanted it to work was to have you click on a team from the drop down menu. After you did this I wanted to have the teams address show up on the map, and show up under the map. Eventually I would have added a box for the user to enter their address and get driving directions. I think this would have been a great tool for any sports fan that lives in Detroit. Obviously it probably would have been obsolete at this point because of GPS systems.

The way it ended up working is the user clicks the drop down box and selects a team. Then the map shows them where the home of that team is. If you click the teams logo under the map then it'll show the user the teams address.

Iteration 3: Continuing to pull my hair

I really wanted my iteration 2 program to work and after hours and much frustration, I decided to give up. I started over and listened to some advice from Chris. He told me to use Google's API to create a site and it's a lot easier than what I was doing. I got the Google key and then continued on to create my site. My site switches blogs at the click of a button. The biggest issue I had was within my PHP file. Every time I tried to run the program, an alert box would come up saying "undefined". I have no clue what that means but that's what it said. No matter what i tried I got the same alert box or no results but no alert box. I am so happy that Chris helped me. If I have learned anything from these iterations it is that I HATE programming.

But when I was in John's office he told me about a cool site that I wished would have helped me more than it did. The site is pipes.yahoo.com. It pretty cool. It is supposed to help create mashups for the people that are not the best programmers but need to get things done. I found the site to be pretty interesting. It can filter contents and do a lot of other stuff.


One of the students from last semester blogged about it and she liked it. If I get more time I am going to try and create my own little mashup and then publish it so that can be searched and people can use it. It might even inspire someone else

Down to the wire

I finally got my iteration3 to work. I had to start over from iteration 2. The older project didn't quite mesh with the newer additions.
I started over using Google's Ajax search API. Using feedcontrol worked great!

var feedControl = new google.feeds.FeedControl();

It allowed me to use several blog feeds and had a handy tabbed feature. my plan from the beginning, was to make a page that I would actually use myself. I have feeds from the several pages that I go to on a day to day basis.

I have learned a lot using that API and will be able to use most of that knowledge on the group project. It isn't up in the dropbox yet because my winzip is out of date on my laptop. It will be submitted when I get home tonight.

Iteration 3

Iteration 3 is finally over with. I personally like to thank each member from IJAM for all there hard work put into the project. I have learned how difficult it is to bring what you image to reality. We envisioned our website to work a certain way and ran into several obstacles.

In a perfect world, group projects would be no problem.There would be no conflict, no slacking, everyone would contribute and things would run smoothly according to schedule. But it's no such thing as a perfect world. I was lost for the last part of iteration 3 and tried to help out in any way possible for the team. After a email to our group Ivaylo shared with me the how difficult it was for everyone in the group and needed my support to work with other parts of the project.

Ultimately things worked out and the project got done to the best our ability.I do have to mention the other groups project looked and functioned very well. I really felt the mountain bike group was over the top and they did a hell of a job. The way they incorporated Wikipedia with Google maps was impressive. Lastly, I can't forget the sister group to IJAM which is called IRAM dating service check it out!!

Group Iteration 3

The semester seems to have come to a quick and screaching halt. Don't get me wrong, its nice to be done, but it seemed like it snuck up me. My group has finally finished iteration 3. Our original idea for a music concert orientated sited seemed simple enough though it grew harder as the semester moved on. Our largest initial difficulty fell into the category of the inability to find suitable API's. While there were many many available, most we came to find out where going have a financial attachment that came with them. In the end we fell into similar standby API's that many of the others in class had chosen to use and master as well.

The class as a whole was a great instrument for every step we took in trying to succeed with this project. In hindsight, i feel like we put too much effort in to being imaginative and to create that masterpiece in our minds. As the end drew near we realized that while we had many creations to use for the flash there was little or no working substance to our project.

This reminded me greatly of project management several of us took the semester before. Our scope had creeped and we had to struggle to make it limping through the finish.

If i could change something other than the book we had used, we have all spoken in class about that before, i would suggest now a different learning structure for the course.

Pre-established compounding projects similar to what we had already done, but with API's chosen by the professor, with more tangible turn ins and benchmarks. But i can only speak for myself, one who always he will always walk the longest distance the lease allows.

Group Iteration 3

Well, I can say that we are almost there. We have the major APIs working, but still run in some bugs. Overall our group came from a long way, since we had limited knowledge in programming. The biggest issues we had was with the pointers on the google mapls, we could get only one. Hopefully by the iteration tonight we will be fine.

I found out while I was working on the ebay API that after you create an account they offer you a full set of develping tools. That is how I learned how to set up the API. It was really nice because I learned some really usefull tips.

Overall we understand the underlying idea of the progect and the techonology behind it. It is that we do not have the final touches. On the other side I do think that we had a really nice idea about the project, just could not fully implement it. Hopefully what we have is enoegh to get us a good grade.

Final Individual Iteration

Well, I see some poeple have really fancy things for their iterations. Unfortunatelly, I am not one of them. I went with the minimum requirements. Actually I did not have much time to work on the bugs I was getting, so I decided to go with just plain xml RSS feed.

As you will see I kept what I had from the last iteration which was pulling name and time from a blog. the only thing I changed on is that I segmented it better where I put some spacing and also included more information. It is nothing fancy, but I hope this part would be safficient to get me through this iteration.

Another, item that I added was a RSS feed from the website called indeed.com. I mentioned in my last blog that this is a tool searching for jobs, that incorporates all job sites, meaning that throught indeed.com you can actually search simultaniusly in sits like monster, and dice, cereerbuilder. What I did is that I preset the search requirements for an IT job with yearly salary over a $100 000 in michigan. You would be surprised but there were quite a few. So I did try to pull just listing and the description for the particular RSS, but I kept having different error. So i have decided to have something working rather than something does not display anything with errors. So this is what I have.

My Iteration 3

For iteration 3 I decided to add Google map markers to my existing Google map. I wanted the markers to represent information about Dogs in the Pinckney area. I added the search to my existing map and was able to input searches and get the results I wanted. However, I found that the search dialog box didn’t show up when I used Firefox! I goofed with that for a long time with no solution so I decided to start over. I grabbed the code to create a map on my page then added the search dialog and that worked with both browsers. I didn’t realize, at the time, that I was using the “local search” feature, but, after I realized that fact I figured it would be good since I wanted a local search.

My goal was to have a couple buttons that a user could click to do predefined searches. In my case they would be for Veterinarians and Kennels. And, actually, that part was easy because it was a basic feature of the local search map. However, I didn’t count on this other “default” feature: “By default, when a search completes, the search results are placed on your map and they are also listed in tabular form above the search form input.” The tabular form obliterated the map points that I was trying to show.

I spent hours looking for a clue about how to get rid of the tabular result list but I couldn’t find anything. I wasn’t even sure what to call that “feature” so it was difficult to search for answers. I finally pasted one of the map URLs into my browser and found what I was looking for.

The nice thing about adding google.maps.LocalSearch() to your Google map is that it allows you to pre-load the search so you can do (in my case) an “execute('veterinarians')” or “execute('kennels')” search by clicking on a button.

// These options will be applied to the search dialog
var options = {

//This text shows in the search dialog

searchFormHint: 'Click a Button or, type here!',

// This stops the initial info window from poping up

suppressInitialResultSelection: true,

//sets the map zoom limit

zoomLimit: 13,

// This suppresses the TAB LIST that obliterates the map points!

resultList : google.maps.LocalSearch.RESULT_LIST_SUPPRESS

};

// This creates the Search Object "mySearch" with the above options

map.addControl(mySearch = new google.maps.LocalSearch(options));

// These are the onClick events for the search buttons which use
//mySearch object and the execute method

function displaySearch(search_string) {

if (search_string == "vet")

{

mySearch.execute('veterinarians');

}

else if (search_string == "kennel") {

mySearch.execute('kennels');

}

}
// HTML Buttons that preform a "predefined" search when clicked

This isn't a detailed description of exactally what you need but, it may give you some ideas of what you can do with Google Maps. I was very surprised to learn how much you can do to customize your map and really amazed at all the Methods and Options.

Personal Project Finished

Last night I wrapped up my work on my individual project. While I am happy that it is finished, I am disappointed that I could not get my site functioning as I originally planned. As a refresher, my site is for a tree care company and I was designing an application for users to submit a bid request. As it stands now, I pull data from the Weather Underground API and Google Calendar RSS feed and display it. The page automatically displays todays weather and the most recent event on the calendar. This would be the first thing that I would change if I had more time to work on the project. I would use a javascript calendar to dynamically display a calendar to my user so they can pick a specific date they wanted to have a bid on.

Another shortcoming for my application is how the data is displayed. I was hoping to throw the results from my API's into a equation that would display an image showing the likelihood that the bid would happen on the requested day. For example, if the calendar showed 9 appointments and the weather was forecasted as rainy, the application would return a sad face and tell the user to select another day. If it was going to be sunny and there were only 3 appointments for that day, the program would return a happy face.

Finally, I am also unhappy with the functionality of the calendar as I have implemented it. Right now I am iterating over the RSS feed from the calendar. What I needed to do was use the GCal data API to be able to download and upload data to the calendar. This requires the use of authentication which didn't appeal to me for usage by customers that wouldn't have access to the calendar.

Part of why I settled with my project as it is now is because the owner of the tree service company, a.k.a. my father, showed a lack of interest in the application. To him, he didn't like the idea of customers telling him when to do a bid. He would much prefer them send him an email telling them what they were interested in and then he would set the final date for the bid. I'll have to rethink this system to better match his business needs before spending a lot of time developing an application that would never be used!

Iteration 3

Some of you probably already know, but the professor have decided to go easy on us, by changing the requirements for Iteration 3. In his last email he has sent the new agenda what we need to do. The two main items were to clean up the RSS feed so it has a clean and meaningful output or pull another web service. It seems that most of the class is already done for Iteration 3 since they have completed those requirements in Iteration 2.

Actually these new requirement will definitely help me since I am not so sure what I was going to do for my Iteration 3. I was worried about it, because I got lots of help from the professors examples in class. So here is what I have so far...







So for iteration 3 I might pull different information from the RSS feed, or maybe incorporate another feed from another blog service, by pulling only the time when the blog was created or maybe pulling the author's profiles. I really want to do something more useful so if any of you have any tips, please let me know.

Building your Proxy Pass-Through URL

Like some of you, I started working on Iteration 3 which involves adding another API to our group website. I thought I would start off with the “easy” stuff and go from there. I had three goals:

1) Figure out how to iterate through the DOM to get multiple events.
2) Figure out how to display the events.
3) See if there is a way to build a URL with a variable that I can change based on a City.

Well, I started with the first problem and found that using my proxy pass-through I got all the information I needed. The DOM contained everything and if I indexed each element I could see multiple event information. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get that information with a for loop and that part may even work. However, I found when I went to the second part and tried to display the information using the innerHTML property it only displayed the last event. I spent quite a bit of time trying separate DIVs with hard coded indexes just to see if it would work. I never got that to work. After emailing one of my group members (James) suggested another soulution which I have not looked at yet. (Mainly because I am a little frustrated with that) Anyway, I decided to move on the difficult goal (number 3). I was surprised that I got that to work in a short time because that seemed to be the most difficult part of everything I was trying to do.

So, if you want to pass a variable into your php proxy pass-through (build the URL) here is how you can do it:

The first thing I did was to adjust my "active.php" file by hacking off the end of the original URL and making it a varible. It was the key text which I have to supply to use the API. Also, note that the part I want to change is just before the key: dma="the city I want to change" then the key follows with an &api_key=... So, the only thing I changed initially was to hack off the key and make it a varible $key = '&api_key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxx' Then you will notice I just apppended it to the original string which was HOSTNAME + path + key which actually was done with the "." php append charater. Which you can see in my example. Once I knew that worked all I had to do was figure out how to supply the "path" as an input varible. This was much simpler than I thought. I spent a lot of time looking on the Internet but ended up just experimenting and figuring it out.

This is my original php:

define ('HOSTNAME', 'http://api.amp.active.com/assets/cycling?dma=Detroit&api_key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx');

$path = ($_POST['path']) ? $_POST['path'] : $_GET['path'];

$url = HOSTNAME.$path;

This has the HOSTNAME, path and my new "key" varible

define ('HOSTNAME', 'http://api.amp.active.com/assets/cycling?dma=');
$path = ($_POST['path']) ? $_POST['path'] : $_GET['path'];

$key = '&api_key=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';

This is where everything gets "appended" to make the URL

$url = HOSTNAME.$path.$key;

Once I realized that I didn't have to do any more with the php script I started playing with the js to see what I needed to do to get the 'path' varible to be the city I wanted to get information about. This is what I ended up doing in my js file.

As you can see I created a varible "event_City" and assigned Detroit to it. Then I add that varible to the url which gets passed in as 'path' and ultimately gets appended to the HOSTNAME and then the key gets appended to that to complete the string. This is what I get when I get events for Detroit:




Now that I have this out of the way all I need to do is figure out the first two "easy" parts and I will be good.