cazh1About the Site
When I talk about having an "offsite strategy" meeting, I'm looking to get out of the office and have some good, "strategic" conversation over a cup of coffee or a beer. Back when I worked for a software development company, we did our best design work at a hot dog stand in Des Plaines, IL; since then, I've always found it more fun to conduct some "bidness" in the proper atmosphere.
For myself, this site serves a practical purpose; I want to be able to quickly identify a short list of candidate spots to get together, based on your location and mine.
I also wanted an excuse to get some hands on with some interesting web technology; I've wanted to build a Google Maps mash-up for some time, and I've been seeing a lot of stuff about jQuery on Twitter. The Calendar is just an embed of my public Google calendar - again, just experimenting with the technology.
(site was originally built in 2009, with additional locations and minor new features added since then)
A Work in Process
I've finally got things somewhat well-behaved in IE6 and IE7, but it's still a little quirky. Aside from buglets like that, I've still got a list of features to add:
- I'm not stuck on the Chicago area - check out Boston, Bloomington, and Cincinnati, for example. I am working on adding a Search box to the map, so you can find _your_ location, then look for my fave in your area. Next time I'm in town ...
- I don't have as many photos as my daughters (14GB!!), but I have some that might be fun to share. Again, mostly just looking for a reason to mess with Picasa and the APIs available there
- I'm still hacking away at the blog and the tweets - and I've looked at some interesting scripts to pull data from those two platforms over here, for some interesting visualizations.
Of course, if you have any feedback - or suggested locations - please let me know.
Credits / Further Reading
Like any self-teaching hack, I've constructed the site as a mix of original stuff plus techniques cribbed from demos and samples of work from other web developers. In particular ...
Google Maps
I've used the Google Maps API V3 as the basis for my Maps stuff. I have an API key, no big deal, but I just like the default navigation features that come with this version (try the scroll wheel to zoom in and out of the map - just like the real thing).
I got most of my ideas for the basic UI and map action from Marc Grabanski, but I had to augment a bit with stuff from this demo program to get the InfoWindows to work like I wanted.
I also needed this handy Lat/Lon tool to get the markers positioned exactly where I wanted them to go. Since then, I've switched Google maps' LatLng Tooltip, an experimental feature from Google Maps Labs.
jQuery
A very nice library of routines, plus I'm amazed at how fast the universe of plugins is expanding. The important ones used on this site include ...
- Rik Lomas' quickSearch plug-in, for the excellent filter action on the table of Locations
- Christian Bach's tablesorter - did you notice that you can sort the table by clicking the headers?
- I have made some progress dealing with the shortcomings of IE6 - thanks to Andreas Eberhard and his PNG-Transparency fix.
- The dropdowns underneath the icons come courtesy of the jQuery Tools of good UI stuff. I think there is more good stuff than just simple tooltips, but that will be for another project.
- I used Mathias Bank's excellent plugin for parsing URL parameters - wanted to send nice-looking links in email to people, that would point them where we should meet.
- When I'm done with a plugin (or my own code), and I'm keeping a local copy, I have used Dean Edward's JavaScript Compressor web app. It works fairly well, although with some code I get quirky results with the compressed results - need to keep fiddling with that stuff.
CSS
This site got me back into practice with CSS, it's been a while since I've worked in this area. I did add Eric Meyer's CSS Reset to the site, another attempt at insulating the IE6 users from unfortunate look/feel issues.
Miscellaneous Tools
I also got a lot of mileage out of a couple of other web-based goodies:
- There are many color tools online, but Color Schemer Online v2 was the best for letting me quickly go from hue to hex.
- I got all of my icons from Iconspedia, a great source for free stuff. I did search a lot on the IconArchive site - good stuff, I just didn't find any that I needed from there.
- I've used the meebo chat widget before, on my blog; it's pretty nifty, and I figured it would make sense to want to get a chat going while we are discussing where to meet up.
Source Code
If you are interested, just give me a shout (click on the address book icon above) ...