Plazes

Plazes

I really like plazes, and have published the where am I widget at davelevy.info. I also have written about it on my blog. At the moment this page documents my RFEs; its the best I can do. However, now they have a getsatisfaction site, so I can upload these things to that site, and shall do so. The site has a widget that can therefore show various topics from the Plazes resources. I have created a gadget that shows my posts immediately below.

It also has a CSS god version, but I think I shall experiment with an outer <DIV STYLE="...." to try an improve the look and feel. I have added a BORDER=0 to bottom line.

Problems with the Plazer.

Too many trazes

Twitter is another application that would prefer that the feed consists of the first in the day, followed by changes only, or more accurately non repeated changes. 15th August 2008

The plazer logs one into the plazes server site, creating a traze when ever you

• login to your user,
• wake the system up from suspension,
• change networks and/or change workstations.

This writes a new traze each time. So rather than display that you are at location x, you may get as many as six or seven trazes written into your rss stream. This is not really what's wanted anywhere but looks poor in the facebook application, particularly since they started using a logo/picture.

• The facebook applet now seems to be behaving more appropriately, although the problem may be based on my Wednesday locations. 31st August 2007

How hard can it be to suppress a traze if its semantically identical to the previous traze.

I logged this at getsatisfation/plazes. There seems no reply. Planet has now moved onto Planet Venus and my Planet notes are on this bliki here, on Planet Planet.

My experimentation with obtaining the feed suggests it needs a login to obtain the feed, which for me is

• http://plazes.com/users/${mynumber}/private/activities.atom

I had some difficulties getting wget to work on the qube and need to continue experimenting with the environment variables.

Notifying by Phone/SMS Errors

The other day, I notified Plazes of a location, and it took over 24 hours to arrive. Plazes wrote three trazes into my tracks and dated it at the time of arrival. I am not sure they support a "remove traze" button. The buttons offered are labelled "Remove Plaze", which isn't what I want.

On Wednesday 12th Sept, I believe I created two new plazes using the phone, both with three letter names, ULU & QMC. The SMS service acknowledged them, but they didn't make it into my traze feed. Actually it was three plazes and the third was the Hamburger Union shop near Goodge St. This is also missing from my traze feed.

Another failure to create a Plaze using SMS with acknowledgement on 18th Sept 2007. The name was over three bytes long.

Again over the weekend 13/14th Sept 2008, I have now bugged this on Get Satisfaction.

MOre problems, with a new phone… bugged it on GetSatisfaction again 7th May 2009.

Plaze Creation by phone/immutable defaults

It defaults the post code (to the post town) and the type to other. These cannot be amended later, only appended. This is very bad if one gets the town confused, or the plazes gets the town confused. It seems to think that Poole is somewhere up north, and I mixed up Christchurch and Chichester. The "Amend Plaze" screen needs to be able to amend the original Post Code and placetype attributes.

This now seems to be impossible. 11 Dec 2007

Need a "Merge Plazes" function

Need I say more. On occasion, I find that there are two plazes on a large site. Plazes logs into both of them. This may need a synonym entity (or attribute) in the data model. (I have notified them of this).

I have now discovered that there are two entries for the Starbucks on Finsbury Dials. This is a nonsense. The Merge Plazes function is becoming more necessary. This is made worse by SMS submissions. They can no longer test alternative near locations.

I now have logged this at getsatisfaction.com/plazes. 11th Sept 2008.

rss feed syntax

I need to check this out, the problem may be in my planet implementation. When I consume the rss feed using planet, the rendered payload includes HTML and so the output looks very poor. I need to conduct some tests before I decide if this is a plazes issue, or my planet implementation. N.B. Bloglines consumes the rss feed perfectly. That's a hint. MS Internet Explorer also renders the RSS feed appropriately. My planet version is very old; my host is also very old as is the OS version. Looks like it might be my problem.

My problem seems to be that the <content> attribute of the feed contains a <DIV> tag and my planet doesn't treat the content as HTML, but as text. Next step is to review the generated HTML, then its on to the Python code.

If anyone else wants to see the badness, check out http://davelevy.dyndns.info/planet/myplazes/

Anyone got an atom lint?

Where's the *ux?

There used to be a linux plazer, and they don't have a Solaris plazer. (They do have a Mac version, so its not UNIX thats the problem. See my blog at these articles

Sort Order shenanigans

The facebook plazes application seems to publish on the basis of the date created attribute, not the date occurred which differ when back dating an event. My stay at the Hotel Confort Art Siru on the 10th/11th Dec 2007 is na example.

RSS publishes on the basis of reverse date created as one would expect. The web widget seems to work on the basis of occurrence date.