OpenBlock

I’ll be at the GeoWorldSummit today, hoping to interest people in OpenBlock and network with other people working on hyperlocal projects. It’s a bit hard to find the address on the event’s web page. More than a bit. It’s at 155 Water St, Brooklyn, NY.  I’ll be wearing a gray OpenPlans T-shirt.   - Paul Winkler

On Thursday 3/17/2011, from 4-7pm CST, Paul will be demoing OpenBlock at the Knight News Innovation Lab’s “News Technology Fair”. It’s being held at Northwestern University’s McCormick Tribune Center in Evanston, IL. Also present will be ... [More] representatives of several other Knight-funded projects, including DocumentCloud. If you’re anywhere near Evanston, come by! [Less]

We recently integrated - and launched on the demo site - a new theme for OpenBlock designed by Phillip Ashlock. Thanks Phil! It’s still a bit rough around the edges - there are some pages that still need attention. But I think you’ll agree that ... [More] this is a big improvement already. You might also notice that the base map tiles are now using Google Maps. This was because we were demoing OpenBlock at the IRE CAR conference and the OSM-derived base layer we’d been using was having server trouble, and it turned out to be quicker to swap in a Google base layer than to fix the server.  This is something I’d always wanted to make configurable anyway, and it turned out to be easy.  (Still need to wire it in to the admin UI though.) Just for fun, here’s a trip through the past. When the EveryBlock code was first released, if you started it up with some data you’d see something like this: Then, just to have something to work with, our coworker Andy did a stopgap design that looked like this (and ran on our demo site until a few days ago): And now we’ve got the new theme: [Less]

It looks a lot nicer now. (We’re using a Woo theme.) And I’ve started a FAQ.

OpenBlock Admin UI Plans: This page on the OpenBlock developer wiki describes the features we’d like to implement in the administrative UI.  Some of this stuff comes for (almost) free, just by enabling various bits of the standard Django Admin UI.  Some of it will require more work. Discussion welcome, as always, over on the ebcode google group.

OpenBlock REST API plans: This page on the developer wiki describes what we’d like to see in an OpenBlock REST API, and current status. Comments welcome over on the ebcode google group.

Two notable followups of the 2010/10/30 Boston Hacks/Hackers hackathon: Adam Marcus and Tim Danford have continued trying to extract OpenBlock’s geocoder into a standalone package. Their work is on github, called djeocoder.  They are working on ... [More] removing dependencies on postGIS and other specific parts of the OpenBlock stack, so it can be used by a wider audience. We’ve talked a bit about merging their work back in to OpenBlock in some way, possibly just depending on djeocoder as a separate package. Mahmood Ali created an Amazon EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) of the OpenBlock Boston demo. As Mahmood says, “Go from zero to a fully-configured and running OpenBlock instance in 3 minutes!” This is a much faster way to get started than installing it yourself. More info in this discussion.   We are going to pursue this avenue farther and expect that this will become a common way to run OpenBlock. [Less]

Notable since the last update: avoid adding duplicate news items got the updater daemon running, so we’re always loading fresh news! more sensible amount of news items on maps some speed improvements a little more admin UI work Also, here’s a fun ... [More] toy: Luke added a (not pretty) view to play with the address extraction / geotagging features.  Try typing in some random text here, sprinkle it with any number of Boston-area addresses, and see if it can get them right: http://demo.openblockproject.org/geotagger In not-so-good news, the base layer we’ve been using on our maps got somewhat broken recently: it doesn’t have accurate shorelines near oceans and the like, so in a number of places things just look wrong.  This affects some other websites too, and will get fixed. (Pretty soon I hope we will have a new, faster, more reliable, and more up to date base layer, thanks to our colleagues at OpenGeo!) [Less]

We have docs online.: These have actually been up since before the 10/30 Hackathon. Generated using Sphinx of course.  Lots of work to do but this is a good start. Luke got the ball rolling on these, thanks Luke!

OpenBlock for Ottawa | Chris Taggart: Another OpenBlock instance gets rolling…