Hi all, I’ve been a lurker for some time and have learned from you all. Thank you so much.
I made public the beta version of my LA foodtruck tracking site http://foodtruckr.com this morning. It basically is a [pseudo] realtime map of the so-called “gourmet” foodtrucks here in Los Angeles, CA. I decided to make it because I was fed up of having to go each of the LA foodtrucks’ twitter pages to see where they were when I felt like some truck food. I figure I should explain how it works. Ok so I’m doing a twitter API scrape of the foodtrucks that tweet, then reverse geocoding their $Location which all goes into a mysql db, and then into a JSON file that the API reads using jquery at site render time in the browser. More detail: the twitter scrape (php) is done every 5 mins or so and puts lots of twitter-related stuff into mysql. The reverse geocode is done at this time (same php script) and that data also slotted into mysql. Once both the scrape & the reverse geocode are done (its quick) another php script is then run which extracts the key map-related data from mysql and writes it into a JSON file. That’s the backend done. (This could all of course be done in realtime by the httpd server/browser, which is how id originally done it, but its not really very good for making a fast or a scalable site, so I moved all the hard stuff to the backend as any good infrastructure guy should do). When people goto the site, jquery reads in the JSON file and the map is generated as per usual. Job done. Its functional, it works, if trucks start using GPS they’ll be added without any intervention on my part needed. But I realize that it’d be great to have a “Get Directions To” link in the infoWindow for each marker. And Ive also seen (somewhere, I forget) a brilliant “Zoom In” button in a marker’s InfoWindow, if you clicked it it would refresh the map and zoom in to street level. Any ideas how to do that? Once Ive got this all finished and the way I like it, I’m going to document the hell out of how I did it and stick up on a site somewhere. I’ve been so grateful for the help on this mailing list I wanna pay it forward so-to-speak so others can tread where I have. Anyway. Would appreciate comments/hints/etc. Thanks again, Rick Tait. [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps JavaScript API v3" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-js-api-v3?hl=en.
