I dunno if its a very good one though. Why don't you have a map of the world, and have people from everywhere to post up what comps and events and rides they're having where and when, so you click on an area and it comes up with a list of stuff to do. ...pretty useless really but it would be pretty cool :ugh2:
Yeah, I've looked into it and its WAY over my head. Basically what I have to do is plot all the zip codes on a map of the U.S. using their latitudes and longitudes. Then, taking the curvature of the earth into account I have to write some sort of program that will calculate distance between them so you can locate riders within a certain mile radius. All of the pre-written programs that will do this are just too damn expensive and not what I want, so its unfortunately on the back burner.
You just need to create a program that uses a spatial data structure similar to a quad tree. Then you can assume uniform curvature of the earth to compute distances. The main hassel would be to create a gui for it. Also populating the zip codes into it will take some time as well. I guess you could have the app running as a service which would get querried by a PHP/Perl script and then spit out info in HTML form for the users to see. Bill, PM me if you want to potentially tackle this.
Thanks for the offer Roman, but the ideal time to tackle this has passed and now school is back in swing full force, plus I am in the middle of another site upgrade. I wanted to tackle it last summer but after researching it I decided against it. If I run into a handful of free-time I'll be sure to drop you a PM . Bill
Great idea, but sounds like a bitch to implement. Would it help if you didnt calculate distances and just had a rough go at where things were? Or would that be pointless? Im not real good at pooters.
Well, I'd either have to implement a system of exact coordinates or a system of "guessed" coordinates. We'd be better off going with the exact coordinates as it wouldn't be any more work.
not to beat a dead horse but what i was thinking of was something a little simple, ie. a page for each state or something. I suppose it would be a bit too much like the local forums you have, but it would be useful for someone who does not keep up to date with everything everywhere, or is beginning, or is going somewhere on holidays with their bike, just so they could get info on things like weekly rides, people to contact, etc.
I don't want to implement a system that will be hard to expand or convert when the time comes to do it properly.
the other site i goto... we have it... and the webmaster didn't do all that, i have no clue how it was done, if u pm me exactly what you would want to say to him, i could forward the pm to him, then tells u what he says...
What Elan said Also, is he using Invision Power Board? I just saw a direct plug-in system for that BB software that allows for this. I'm not changing board software though, vB is still the best available.
