2012 Starts With a New WifiPDX

If I were a cobbler and I had kids, they’d be very happy today. Today would be the day I finally gave them shoes! My Portland WiFi site was responsible for some of my first forays into map scripting, but it was dreadfully out of date. Now the site has a brand new look and is more map-centric than it was when it was redesigned six years ago.

In fact, when I started the site in 2004, there was no such thing as the Google Maps API. And I’ve given many mapping talks where I go a little bit grandpa on the audience, telling them how hard it was to translate addresses to latitude and longitude points (geocode) in those days.

The WifiPDX of 2005-2011 was showing its age, both technically and visually. In late 2008 I started working on a new version, but writing a mapping book got in the way of creating a mapping site. Finally, last August I decided to pick up the project again.

When I look at the progression of the site, I’m really happy with the updates. But, working in fits and starts over the last few months, I had a much longer list of things to do. These weren’t even major features, just ways to polish what’s there. Then I realized I needed to listen to my own advice and release early rather than release ready.

Some of the non-technical updates I particularly want to point out:

Every hotspot page can be edited by anyone–WifiPDX is a sorta-Wiki
The home page is mapified, complete with closest WiFi searching
The closest WiFi feature tries to guess your location
The WiFi map can show both neighborhoods and types of places

There’s plenty more going on, but those are the big ones. I could also do plenty more to it–and perhaps I will. But for now it’s nice to be at a state of completion on my first side project in two years.