If you go to a post on streetsblog.org, type in a beautifully written comment, fill in the rest of the fields including 5+7 is, um, 13 and hit “Post”, you get “Error: You have entered the wrong sum in the spam protection field…” Damn! So you hit Back and go to correct your error only to find that your comment is gone and you’ll have to type it all over again. Sucks! (more…)
Who knew there are over 3000 block parties in New York City each summer? Well, we’ve just launched BlockPartyNYC.org to be the go-to site for everything block party. Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock and myself have been working on this site over the last few months in partnership with Transportation Alternatives. It contains information to assist you in throwing a block party, and allows you to promote your block party on our interactive map. You can also sign up for weekly notifications of block parties in your neighborhood.
The tricky part now is to draw enough interest to get the bulk of the 3000 block parties registered on the site without which our weekly notifications would be less useful. Transportation Alternatives is in contact with the Upper West Side Community Board to encourage them to register each block party they approve. We hope to also work out similar partnerships with other Community Boards. As a return service, we have developed a widget for inclusion on Community Board sites that lists their upcoming parties.
Behind the scenes is a PostGIS database we use for its spatial queries. The site is built in pylons and Wordpress, and the mapping is done using OpenLayers. The site was built to facilitate re-skinning for other purposes. If you are interested in using or developing with the open source software we wrote, the Block Party project page has the details.
So check it out! Find out when parties are coming up in your neighborhood. If you know anyone throwing a party, get them to register it on the site, and, don’t be shy, go and throw a party yourself!
I have just released version 0.2 of the WordPress Comment Geo Maps plugin. I’d like to also announce that it is now being used in production on GothamSchools.org. Version 0.2 has a bunch of general improvements and bug fixes. I have moved the project page for the plugin to its TOPP Labs trac instance but the general discussion about the plugin is still ongoing, for now, on this page. For more information about this release, please go to the project page.
Over the last couple of weeks I developed a plugin that allows Wordpress comments to be geo-located on a map to enable geo-based conversations. Today I have released version 0.1. The idea for this came from Nick Grossman. See the Comment Geo Maps plugin page for comments and suggestions.
At the South by Southwest Interactive conference this past weekend I attended a number of sessions that dealt with the sociological effects of our new suite of social networking tools including twitter, facebook, online dating sites, blogs, and news and tech forums. At each talk during the five-day conference, a twitter hash tag was used to coordinate a background discussion on the topic being presented. This twitter stream was often used to steer the direction of the presentation and was used for questions during the Q & A period.
In “Change Your World in 50 Minutes: Making Breakthroughs Happen,” Kathy Sierra talked about how she had famously avoided using twitter for years. People would insist, however, that, “You just don’t get twitter!” and in this talk she finally conceded to the mysterious genius of twitter—something no one seems to be able to really explain except by presenting a series of anecdotes about how twitter has changed their life.
Right after her talk Bruce Sterling took the stage for his meandering poetic monologue on the state of cyberspace. About half-way through the talk he got to the topic of twitter and looked out upon a sea of twittering audience members, paused a moment to listen to the tap-tap-tap of keyboards, before saying something like, “you listen to what’s being said for 2 minutes and then have to let everyone know what you heard so you twitter about it and then miss the part where I talk about dogs fucking horses… Don’t fool yourself–you are losing out here!” (more…)
Today I released a new version of the Top Post from Category plugin, v.0.3. This widget is now a multi-widget, that is, it is built to allow multiple instances of itself on a single sidebar, each serving the top post of a different category. This feature had been requested a few times by people including the bloggers at GothamSchools. I figured out how to do this by using the example at the bottom of the wp-includes/widgets.php file.
The other thing I added is a drop-down listing of categories for the admin ui. This saves people having to lookup their category id themselves.
Please go here for more information, to ask questions and to comment on this plugin.
Since my last post on this, I have made a few tweaks to GothamSchools.org to try and further improve its rankings on Google:
Today, this is how GothamSchools is ranking on Google:
Last year a few of us here at TOPP built BlockPartyNYC. This project was done for Transportation Alternatives, mainly to promote their party sponsorship program. A sponsored block party received consulting on solutions to community problems like traffic, speeding, and noise and air pollution.
For this year of block parties in NYC, we have plans to make BlockPartyNYC the main hub for all 3000 NYC parties. We plan on receiving data feeds from Community Boards as they approve block parties and, in turn, hosting relevant parties on Community Board sites. We plan on having more advanced mapping, facebook integration, and other features.
See the full specification. If anyone has comments on the proposed ways of tackling the new site, please get in touch.
This release removes the dependency on the excerpt reloaded plugin and fixes the “more” tag which used to disappear when you overrode the excerpt. For more information and to leave comments, go here.
The initial research into Search Engine Optimization of GothamSchools.org was discussed in this post. Since then, I have made some changes to the site:
I changed the <title> tag on the home page of the site to read “GothamSchools - Breaking News and Analysis of the NYC Public Schools”
These changes were made on December, 19, 2008. Within a day or so I noticed a change in our ranking for some of our keyword phrases. The new rankings fluctuated a bit over the last few weeks. Today, this is how GothamSchools is ranking: