RRC Archives

Cool,
I may be slow but I get it now .
Thanks for all your hard work Jack!

Jack rules.

Jack wrote:Yasmeen asked for Previous and Next buttons. They've been on the todo list forever, and are *easy* to do, so I did them.

Except they don't really work all the time. Every route has a "map number", the number you'd put next to it on the little map of the crag. They mostly are just Johnny's numbers, so when new routes get added we give them "numbers" like "3a" for the route between 3 and 4.

My previous and next buttons don't understand such subtleties. The route after 3 is always 4. The route before 4 is always 3. Even if there is a 3a.


Still, better than nothing. If I can finish this other project (get out of school), I'll probably fix them.

I think that there's an overall issue with the route numbering. Now that the old "paper book" numbering is being augmented (frequently), the system is being shreded. I don't know if my suggestion is good, but it's an alternative:

Why are the routes numbered? They are numbered in order to match them to maps/topos. After all, no one says "I sent route #42!", they use the route's name. In theory, with a totally online guide, it should be possible to just renumber routes as the are entered into the online guide. Thus, if a new route goes in between #6 and #7, then the new route could become #7 and all the higer numbered routes would be incremented by 1.

The problem: static vs. dynamic topos. Right now, the topos are 'static' - they're just like a photocopy of a drawing, and don't update with the changes to the rest of the guidebook until someone goes in and edits them. In an ideal world, when a new route is added at a crag, then the new route would appear automatically on the topo.

Keep in mind that I haven't gotten off my butt to actually do anything about this, so I am NOT complaining - I'm just brainstorming. In theory (there I go again) a system like SVG (an open-ish alternative to Flash - it's an XML based vector graphics format) should be useful here. You would lay out the outline of the crag, then for each route, there would be an X and Y coordinate for the location of the route on the topo where the number and arrow should point. Then, when the page is loaded, the server would generate a fresh SVG element with some 'trivial' (ha!) script, so that the topos are always up to date, and the route numbering can be logically sequential, and, finally, the 'previous' and 'next' buttons would work!

See! Trivial! Jack could whip this out in no time! (Totally kidding!)

Actually, I did just check out some of the info on SVG, and it is fairly human readable. Maybe with some scripting help, my zany dynamic topo idea isn't so crazy!

hey i have another suggestion. can you make some kind of adjustment that makes the routes you've done appear in a different color than the ones you haven't done?

Horatio, that's the gayest thing in the world I've ever heard of. Did your mom tell you to say that? Are you wearing a thong? You are so gay it makes me sick to my stomach.

Tom, that's exactly why I haven't renumbered the routes. The existing topos reflect Johnny's numbers. It was just a timeline and planning issue. Whip up that dynamically updated topo and we'll implement it.

Oh yea....
Volunteers wanted to do static topos. It would be really cool if someone could volunteer to do that. Use anything you want.....it doesn't matter. See Oil Crack for example.

SCIN wrote:Horatio, that's the gayest thing in the world I've ever heard of. Did your mom tell you to say that? Are you wearing a thong? You are so gay it makes me sick to my stomach.

Maybe HF's sexual orientation is wearing off on me, but I actually agree with the Red's most flaming queen on that - color coding based on one's spray list would be pretty cool.

SCIN wrote:Tom, that's exactly why I haven't renumbered the routes. The existing topos reflect Johnny's numbers. It was just a timeline and planning issue. Whip up that dynamically updated topo and we'll implement it.

I have 'gotten off my butt' (so to speak) and done some prelminary work on researching SVG. Specifically for dynamically generated topos, it would work really well. It should be easy to write a PHP (or similar) script that pulls some X and Y coordinates for each route and uses them to add some arrows and number tags on top of the topo. It's just like rendering HTML. The down side is that the end user has to download/install an SVG plugin (it's straightforward from Adobe and available for Win/Mac/RH and even Solaris). In the long run, it might be worth it to proceed this way because SVG can be used to do the sort of interactive map stuff that Michelle has proposed.

I'm working towards a 'proof of concept' version using AppleScript (just because it's what I know, a bit). Once I've got that working, I would need some help translating it to PHP (or whatever).

SCIN wrote:Oh yea....
Volunteers wanted to do static topos. It would be really cool if someone could volunteer to do that. Use anything you want.....it doesn't matter. See Oil Crack for example.

If no one else is starting on the Arena, I could use Lynne's sketch for the area as a base and whip up a 'static' version, and get it up on the guide. Then I could use it as my base for the 'proof of concept'.

Here's what I whipped up for the Arena (based on Lynne's sketch). There are a bunch of routes missing - can anyone help me refine this and fill in what's missing?



I'm also open to input on making this look better!

Congrats Tom. You got the job. That is beautiful.
I'll be contacting you for changes (you left out my new super-cool crack route).

Tom,
Here is a revised map.

That looks awesome, you guys! Nice work!