Review System Tweaks
The Beer Mapping Project’s Review System is constantly a work in progress. We are adding or tweaking the system quite a bit from day to day to make it more streamlined and to add what we hope will be useful features. In this post, I plan to outline a few of the more interesting features that have been updated or added recently.
Review Maps:
First off, we have added small proximity maps that are accessible from each review page. These maps are hidden at first, but with one click the map will slide out and appear above the address and score information for this location. You can click the following link to see this feature in action (click the “more info” tab on that page to see the map pop out).
Review Badges:
Hopefully these maps will help you get your bearings when you are reading the reviews for a location you plan to visit. While you are reading these reviews, we also though it would be helpful if you were able to tell from a glance which reviewers were reviewing based on regular experience at this location or whether they were reviewing based on minimal experience.
In my opinion, this is useful for both the reviewer and the review reader simply because it helps the reviewer show that they may have missed a thing or two about this location simply because they have only visited once. These badges that are displayed are editable by the reviewer, so if after a few months they have visited this location more, they can go back in and edit their review and change the number of times they have visited.
This is simply a feature that we felt could help those of you with attention problems and allow you to skim through the reviews a bit while still being able to absorb a bit of important information. See the following image for an example of one of the new “review badges”. There are also badges for the high and low scores for each location that has been reviewed more than once.
Custom Maps for each Reviewer:
There is also a new feature that is available for all users, not just reviewers. There is a link for each active reviewer in their review list page that will allow you (and them) to see all of the locations they have reviewed mapped out in one map. This feature takes advantage of google’s mapping kml feature that allows any generated kml to be shown on a map. Basically, this feature will simply give you a link where you can see all locations reviewed by an individual placed on one map for you to check out.
The following image will show you where to find the link (click image to see the actual page):
When the above pictured link is clicked you will be sent to google’s page and you will see a map that should look a lot like the next image (click the image to see the actual page):
Because this link is actually generating kml for this particular user, it is also possible to right click and perform a “save as” on this link to save the file to your computer. Simply change the file extension from “.php” to “.kml” and this file will be readable and savable in the free google earth application.
Hopefully these features will be helpful to some of you. Many of you will probably glaze over them. But if we can get just one more person to become interested and check out one more craft beer location, then we are on our way to accomplishing our goal!
As always, all comments are welcome. Even the mean/evil ones!
Register and start reviewing!
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:17 am
Can you explain in detail for us geeky type folks what the KML is from Google? A little history lesson, current use of KML and what the letters stand for?
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:59 am
kml = keyhole markup language
Google Earth used to be called “Keyhole” before Google bought it, so the kml format is based on that original name.
kml is a way of writing information in a format that is based on xml standards. These are both formats containing information that was originally intended to be consumed and processed by computers (not people). xml has become well known for rss feeds and most newer browsers are built to read and display rss/xml in a pretty format.
kml will look much like xml when you look at the results (you have to save it and open it with notepad or a similar text editor). But kml up until recently is meant to be read by google earth. Now google is allowing any kml file hosted on the internet to be read by maps.google.com and each location in those files can be saved to your “my maps” account on google.
For more information on kml, including structure examples you can check here;
http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/
May 29th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Thanks, it’s nice to hear the background info on that technology!