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[sidebar] An EVOKE agent map?

As I've seen a lot of people wondering about other EVOKE agents in their area, would anyone be interested in an EVOKE agent map where agents can go add their locations and a little note?

I've got something that I can repurpose perfectly for this.

EDIT: And here it is: http://redct.info/evoke_map

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by MoE on March 14, 2010 at 10:08am

I'm realizing now, that somebody already did what I was thinking since a week and still didn't manage to actualize. Thanks for that work.

Actually what I had in my mind was a slightly different solution, as I was looking for a way to get an automatic update directly from EVOKE's engine, without asking agents to re-sign up. Yesterday I was looking around for APIs which could make it possible, but I'm a noob with Ning and I couldn't figure out any realistic solution.

I read here that you're a developer of EVOKE tools, then I would ask: is there any chance to query for agents' main info and location, to be fed via XML or something similar? This way, locations could be shown in realtime; in addition, those infos would be mashable and that would be very useful to develop new mission tools.

Personally, I'm preparing maps as well for a couple of missions I proposed on my blog (here and here). I'd be happy to have some help or just feedbacks, given my average-low scripting skills.

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Permalink Reply by Joseph Nadler on March 16, 2010 at 12:32pm

You need to update your apache configuration to add index.php to the list of index pages :-D

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Permalink Reply by Nathaniel Fruchter on March 17, 2010 at 5:51am

Weird, not sure why that un-configured itself.

Joseph Nadler said:

You need to update your apache configuration to add index.php to the list of index pages :-D

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Permalink Reply by Nathaniel Fruchter on March 17, 2010 at 5:52am

The agent map (http://evoke.redct.info/evoke_map/) now has all 9700+ agents added directly from the Ning database. Unfortunately, there's no real way to query as the user DB dump has to be gotten from an account on the network with admin status. Plus, after that, the data needs geocoding and some reformatting to work with the map.

Stefano Cieri said:

I'm realizing now, that somebody already did what I was thinking since a week and still didn't manage to actualize. Thanks for that work.

Actually what I had in my mind was a slightly different solution, as I was looking for a way to get an automatic update directly from EVOKE's engine, without asking agents to re-sign up. Yesterday I was looking around for APIs which could make it possible, but I'm a noob with Ning and I couldn't figure out any realistic solution.

I read here that you're a developer of EVOKE tools, then I would ask: is there any chance to query for agents' main info and location, to be fed via XML or something similar? This way, locations could be shown in realtime; in addition, those infos would be mashable and that would be very useful to develop new mission tools.

Personally, I'm preparing maps as well for a couple of missions I proposed on my blog (here and here). I'd be happy to have some help or just feedbacks, given my average-low scripting skills.

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Permalink Reply by MoE on March 17, 2010 at 6:32am

This is very nice! Thank you Nathaniel.

I noted there're multiple entries for a same user, maybe the user name and/or location should be checked before placing a new marker. But it is really a minor issue.
Again, for mashing-up purposes, I would ask if it is possible to export periodically an XML from the database, so that it would be accessible to other developers. It could be automatically done just by attaching the script to some recurring function.
If you're too busy for it, just let me know the name of the fields where main user infos are stored, and I'll write a basic XML exporter (would PHP be ok?). In this case you should just complete the script with database name, user and pwd (I know I can't ask you those), tables' name, and the path to save the xml.

Please let me know if you think it might be feasible; it would be very useful to me, for a couple of "missions" I'm working on and, generally, for further developments.

Thanks again

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Permalink Reply by Nathaniel Fruchter on March 17, 2010 at 4:36pm

The main problem is there's no database to access; you have to do it manually from the Ning backend. I would let you have access to an automated feed of that export, but it has emails and so on, so I'm not really comfortable letting that loose.

Stefano Cieri said:

This is very nice! Thank you Nathaniel.

I noted there're multiple entries for a same user, maybe the user name and/or location should be checked before placing a new marker. But it is really a minor issue.
Again, for mashing-up purposes, I would ask if it is possible to export periodically an XML from the database, so that it would be accessible to other developers. It could be automatically done just by attaching the script to some recurring function.
If you're too busy for it, just let me know the name of the fields where main user infos are stored, and I'll write a basic XML exporter (would PHP be ok?). In this case you should just complete the script with database name, user and pwd (I know I can't ask you those), tables' name, and the path to save the xml.

Please let me know if you think it might be feasible; it would be very useful to me, for a couple of "missions" I'm working on and, generally, for further developments.

Thanks again