Find the Landmark Weblog

Thanks to the design geniuses at HappyGoFun, Find the Landmark has a whole new look and feel. Gameplay has also been improved (you get to start the clock!). Check it out.

I’ve added basic editing functionality. Is there a landmark that doesn’t look quite right? Now you can go in and change the exact location of each vertex of the bounding polygon. It’s a bit cumbersome, especially for landmarks with lots of vertices, but then again, if there are a lot of vertices then the contributor probably put more thought into it. All prior revisions are saved.

They’re not all questions, and they’re not all frequent, but I added FAQ to answer some of the questions that have come up in the last few weeks.

Thanks to Leo for asking about the “show solution” feature, which centers the map on the solution but leaves you at the default zoom level to zoom in (or out, in the case of the “Earth” landmark) to see the exact boundary. I thought that in order to fix this, I’d have to find the bounding rectangle for the polygon and somehow map that to the discrete zoomlevels that Google Maps has. Silly me, making the problem harder than it has to be. All I have to do is record the zoomlevel at which the polygon was drawn, or the zoomlevel at which people are actually finding the landmark! I’m doing both of those now. So, new landmarks should zoom correctly, and over time, the old landmarks should zoom correctly as people find them (again).

I’ve imported US State boundary data into the landmark database, thanks to the US Census Bureau. The data is terribly accurate, and when I tried to use it as-is, Google Maps’s polyline functions caused Firefox to come back with a dialog asking me to kill the script. (We’re talking polylines made of hundreds if not thousands of points here.) So I rounded off the data to the nearest tenth, which results in some funny squiggles, but for the most part, works pretty good. For Alaska I had to round off to the nearest whole number because it was still too freaking huge. There were also some problems with “island” states, like Hawaii and Michigan, and my data schema doesn’t support non-contiguous regions.

I’ve added a simple comment board to each landmark, and redesigned the bottom of the page a bit.

1. Did a major cleanup of the interface. It’s still not pretty, but at least it’s a bit more organized now.

2. “Flag landmark for review” now includes descriptions of what’s wrong with the landmark. It may be a duplicate, incorrect, or offensive in some way. Thanks to Jonathan for the suggestion.

3. The comprehensive high scores list has been moved to a different page. Tacking on a table of 1000 rows to each page was slowing down load times, preventing us from wasting time efficiently. Thanks again to Jonathan.

4. Categories! I haven’t finalized the list of categories, nor have I finished categorizing all the existing landmarks. But the functionality is there and you can browse through the ones that have been categorized so far, which is pretty fun. (Again, the interface is going to be improved, but this’ll do for starters.) You can also specify a category for landmarks that you add. Let me know if there is a category that isn’t there that you’d like. I had to get creative with a few of them . . .

5. When adding a landmark, I do a simple check to see if a name duplicate already exists for that landmark before you start drawing the outline. That should cut down on those annoying duplicates. A lot of people have complained about this, and it bugs me too.

I think that’s all for now. Have fun!

Find the Landmark surpassed the 1000 landmark mark today, thanks in part to Steve Bass’s entertaining post to the PCWorld staff blog. Now we have to organize them all better. It seemed like a good idea at first to list all the landmarks on the same page…

As you can see, I’ve moved from Blogspot, even though I like Blogger, over to use Wordpress on the new host, where I have a bit more control. (And I love to play with new software.) Soon maybe I can get back to working on the actual game…

Find the Landmark has moved to its new domain and host! I had to make a few minor tweaks to the code, but it all seems to be working now. I may have missed something, though, so let me know if you notice that something isn’t working right. All your old bookmarks should redirect to the right place.