Entries tagged “yahoo!”

Yesterday as I left work it dawned on me that I had been in the San Francisco Bay Area for a year. It is one of the most drastic changes in my life since going to college.

[tags]jobs, yahoo, symfony[/tags]

[tags]yui, yahoo, css, snippet, textmate, ems, px[/tags]

If you use YUI grid layouts you’ll notice that ems are the preferred units and for good reason. But ems don’t make sense to people like us who want to be super precise down to the pixel… pixels make sense.

So type in a number select it and run this ruby script as a TextMate command (that outputs as a snippet):

You’ll have the proper tab stops to change the newly calculated ems from width to margin-left or margin-right or whatever it is you desire.

I do a lot of YUI grid layouts and I love the nestable grids:

<div class="yui-g$1"> 
	<div class="yui-u first">
		$2
	</div>
	<div class="yui-u">
		$3
	</div>
</div>

There’s a tab stop after yui-g in case you want to use one of the variants (yui-gb, yui-gc, etc).

I’m working on a site that uses two equal width columns… a lot… so this comes in quite handy. So long tables.

Some of the first non-Minnesotan restaurants to show up were Flying Dog, Bangalore and Konstam… all of them outside the US. Wasn’t expecting that… but then again, I wasn’t really surprised.

I finally updated our location tables to account for different countries. Currently it’ll only plot what it can Geocode, and relies exclusively on Yahoo! for GeoCoding.

I’ve only tested this with a Canadian restaurant. Hopefully it’ll work elsewhere soon. If anybody plans on adding any non-US, non-Canadian restaurants, let me know if you can figure out how to GeoCode things properly.

Also, I’m pleased as punch that the map on the homepage shows three states as having recent restaurants. Rock on!

[feedback]: http://reviewsby.us/feedback [r1]: http://reviewsby.us/restaurant/tony-romas/location/mall-of-america [s1]: http://spindrop.us/2006/04/26/easy_yahoo_maps_and_georss_with_symfony [fried]: http://reviewsby.us/tag/fried [r]: http://reviewsby.us I added a lot more features to [the reviewsby.us site][r]. One thing I was [ask][feedback]ed about was adding a price field. I added that in, it could use some work, but it is a start. I also cleaned up some of the location formatting (see [Tony Roma's at the MOA][r1]) so the phone numbers are legible. The real exciting thing is maps. Applying the same principles from the [Yahoo! Map tutorial][s1], I added maps to all the tag pages. Want to know [where to find fried food][fried]? Just look at the map. I'm taking a few shortcuts now. For example most of our restaurants are located in Minneapolis, therefore the maps seem to center in on the Twin Cities area. This of course may get messy over time when more restaurants get added outside the Minneapolis area. By then, I'll have some personalization setup to narrow down on restaurants based on where the visitor is located.

[rbu]: http://reviewsby.us/ [ymap]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/index.html [gmap]: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ [ygeo]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html [GeoRSS]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/georss/index.html [symfony]: http://www.symfony-project.com/ [GeoRSS][GeoRSS] is an extension of RSS that incorporates geographic data (i.e. latitude/longitude coordinates). This is useful for plotting any data that might need to be placed on a map. While building out the [reviewsby.us][rbu] map, I decided to use the [Yahoo! Maps API][ymap] versus the [Google Maps API][gmap] because I wanted to gain some familiarity with another API. It was worth trying [Yahoo!'s API][ymap]. First of all, [reviewsby.us][rbu] has addresses for restaurants and Yahoo! provides a simple [Geocoding REST][ygeo] service. This made it easy for me to convert street addresses to latitude and longitude pairs (even though this wasn't required as we'll soon see).^[1] The real selling point of [Yahoo!][ymap] was the [GeoRSS] functionality. I can extend an RSS feed (which [symfony] generates quite easily) to add latitude or longitude points (or even the street address), direct my [Yahoo! map][ymap] to the feed and voila, all the locations in that feed are now on the map, and when I click on them, the RSS item is displayed. That cut down on a lot of development time.