Last week I was intending to spend on all mapme.at, all the time. Things didn’t quite work out so well but I did get some stuff done. The week started slowly as I procrastinated due to jet lag and generally not feeling like getting back to “work” after my holiday. Most of Monday was spent catching up on the bits of client work that had come in during my three weeks away, I also booked in a full day of client work on the Thursday to sort out some problems a client was having.

Royal Iris - Mersey Ferry

Tuesday I decided to take a trip into town and debug the problems we’ve been having with the Mersey Ferries on mapme.at. For some reason their positions haven’t been updating on shipais.com and I wanted to see with my own eyes that they were running. Soon after I got to the ferry terminal Royal Iris turned up to confirm that they were running fine. I decided not to pay for a trip myself so that I could talk to the skipper, good thing too as when I got home later in the afternoon I found they’d randomly started working again that morning!

On Wednesday I finally got going with some more work on mapme.at. First thing I needed to do was fix a problem that was causing duplicate places to show up due to the recent updates. Currently when a user looks at an area and they’re zoomed in enough I always download data from cloudmade, de-dupe it against data I’ve already cached and then add any extra records to my database. Cloudmade provide their own IDs for their results and I had assumed that these would be unique, I had also de-duped against the OSM IDs but a bug in that code had stopped it from working. It turns out the IDs provided by Cloudmade change (every time they do an OSM import I’m guessing) but they’re also unnecessary for my purposes - I will only use a result if it has an OSM ID anyway - so I’ve switched to de-duping on the OSM IDs only and everything seems to be working now.

I also started working on integrating Facebook Connect. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to get going on mapme.at, especially if they’re using a mobile app, and I think a good way to do this is by using Facebook Connect as most people are going to have an account on Facebook. I found it quite fiddly to get going with Facebook Connect, it seems to require JavaScript which I wanted to avoid, and there’s a variety of Ruby libraries with no real consensus on which is best. I ended up using Facebooker and following this tutorial which pretty much sorted me out. Watch out for the bug on that page though, you need “before_filter :create_facebook_session” not :set_facebook_session.

On Friday I got most of the Facebook work finished, on my development version I can now attach a Facebook account to an existing mapme.at account and use Facebook Connect for login and signup. I haven’t pushed it live yet as I want to improve the signup process a little but it’s definitely getting there.

This coming week I’ve got a trip to London (today) to talk about some more client work but hopefully I’ll get some more stuff done on mapme.at today. I’m actually hoping to get GPX file import working so that I can have a lot more data for visualisations for my Where 2.0 talk. That’s also going to be the main thing I’ll be doing this week, trying to get my talk completed and ready for handing over on Friday!