The World Wide Pinball Locator Development Blog Information about what's happened and what's going to happen with the Locator. To learn more about Joe Entropy, read Joe Entropy's Pinblog! Go back February 21 2011 New games Not much of an update, but my hand was forced by Stern shipping the Rolling Stones game. Rather than showing just the latest game on the home page, I decided to display the last couple of games... and if we do indeed get another pinball manufacturer later this year, we may have more than one new game at a time (here's hoping!). And I kind of got a little carried away with it graphically. ^_^; Enjoy. December 27 2010 2010 Last Gasp This is just bug fixes and a tiny but crucial feature. Added a free-form text field for distance searches... now in addition to a ZIP code or US Metro area, you can enter whatever you want and we will try to find pinball machines near it. This plugs a crucial hole in distance searches, namely the complete lack of non-US ways to search. Now you can enter your hotel address in Oslo, Norway and find all the locations within 10 miles! Unfortunately I haven't gotten around to point coding most of our non-US locations... So what am I doing New Year's Eve? Staying home and getting that done. Fixed a bug that was annoying to me, even if no one else noticed it... equi-distant locations with multiple machines in a distance search would get split up, resulting in multiple entries and bad counts. This was highly noticeable when searching within 25 miles of ZIP 80501, which split Lyons Classic Pinball and Oskar Blues into 11 separate locations with almost 300 games between them. Fixed an issue found by my league's crack Pinball Repair Guy where you couldn't edit a location or pin if it had double quotes in the notes. Fixed a problem I didn't even know existed until I found it while testing... searching for games by name was yielding locations without that game if said locations used to have that game. See you in 2011 with some more neat stuff! December 5 2010 Mapping!!! Our last big update of the year adds the most useful feature... mapping of locations. Yes, the search results page now has a map on it by default. You can turn the map off on the search entry page, but why would you want to? I thought this was going to be a lot harder, but the Google Maps API made it pretty painless. I've also updated the location editing page so it will automatically point code the location address. This is a definite improvement over the current method, which consists of me running around behind everybody and coding new entries by hand. It wasn't usually as bad as it sounds... I would check the site when I had a free sec and code new items. But then yesterday somebody entered 30 new locations at once, which is great and all, but it made me glad that I'd finished the automatic coding the night before... ^_^; Over the next couple of weeks I'll finally get around to point coding all the non-U.S. locations, and I'll probably sneak in another new feature to make things easier for folks outside of the U.S. to find their pins. Also, I'll be integrating a bunch of data into the Locator that we got in a recent exchange with the Pinball Finder iPhone App, which is pretty handy for your on-the-go pinball finding needs. Pinball Finder had a huge number of U.K. locations, which is a welcome addition to the measly six that we currently have. In doing so, there may be some duplicate entries while I weed out some issues between the two databases. And please note that if you have a bunch of pinball location data sitting around your house, let us know! We like to share! After seeing how terrible some things on the site worked in browsers other than the one I use, I did a bunch of fixes that should improve cross-browser compatibility... it seems certain software companies feel that standards compliance doesn't apply to them. OK, I uploaded the changes above and took the dog out for a walk and something was bothering me. It bugged me that when you do a search for a particular game the list shows the locations and just that game, not all the other games that are at that location. And that is especially irksome because when you click on the pins on the map you get the same behavior. So I made the change and now you get all the games for that location. Credit my dog for that enhancement. Other than that, feel free to feed us back on what you think and suggestions for new features. Enjoy! November 14 2010 Delete Part 2 A few more changes... Updated deleting games so it's a little harder, pretty much for the same reason that I made location deletion harder. I kind of didn't want to go this route, but eventually all location and game editing is going to happen in-page anyway so everything I'm doing now is basically throwaway code. So we'll all have to live with that for a few months. When adding a new location, your current search terms are added to the appropriate fields to keep you (and me) from re-typing stuff. Fixed links so that foreign characters don't mess up the URL... so now you can actually click on the address link of the location in Japan and have it open properly. The Census Bureau metropolitan area list I'm using (Combined Statistical Areas, if anyone cares) does not include certain major cities because of what I would call a definitional quirk. So I've added the following metros by hand: El Paso, Miami, Phoenix, San Diego, Tampa, Portland, Jacksonville, San Antonio, and Virginia Beach. There are a few new fields for locations: vendor, phone number, league, and tournament. A lot of people put vendor and phone into the notes field (especially our friends in Colorado, who are extremely vendor-centric!), so I thought having dedicated fields would be good. They don't show up anywhere and you can't do anything with them yet, but we'll do something with them in the next update. At Ken's suggestion, I moved my name to the top of the thanks list on the front page. I am by nature an extremely modest person, but I'm also doing a lot of work on this site. ^_^; As usual, we welcome your suggestions! And at this point, the next thing I have to do is mapping. Expect that soon-ish. October 24 2010 Delete for the Elite Made a couple of changes that I've been intending to do for a while. Updated deletion so it's a little harder. This may not sound quite so cool, but we've had a problem where the Google search crawler seems to be deleting random records every few days, which is annoying. This should keep that from happening. You also now have to give a reason for deleting the location, which I've been wanting to do for a while. If you don't add "http" to a web site address, we'll add it for you. If it's not there, clicking on the link doesn't work. I added a feature on the spur of the moment because I think it would be useful: You can now do distance searches around cities as well as ZIP codes. I added this because most of the questions you see on rgp are of the form "Does anyone know where to play pinball in Indianapolis?", not "Does anyone know where to play pinball near ZIP 46201?" I figure ZIPs are useful when you're looking for places to play near you, whereas cities are useful when you're looking to play while traveling. And yes, this is a much larger list of cities than the previous Metro Area list. August 27 2010 International Love Since the last update didn't have much for our pals abroad, we added several features which should appeal to the Sophisticated International Pinball Locateur. We're filtering the list of countries by what's actually in the database, which will make selecting them a lot easier (the full list is still available for when someone finds a pin in Azerbaijan). We've added support for non-US states and provinces. Australia and Canada have enough entries that they get a drop down list... everybody else gets to type them in. Feel free to add Postal Codes too. On the home page, Pinbot is presenting the most recently updated entries, the count of locations in games is now correct, and there's now a direct link to locations with Avatar... so get in that AMP Suit, march down to your local arcade, and drop a few quarters in one today! A count of search results appears on the search results page. After some embarassing trips to the field in the middle of nowhere, I believe I've finally cleansed and properly point-coded all the locations I can. And remember, I'm adding lat/longs by hand for the time being, so don't be surprised if your new location takes a while to appear in distance searches. There were a couple of bug fixes, but the one that's likely to be noticed is that now names and addresses with & in them were messing up URLs when linking. So go forth and locate! August 15 2010 Bug fixes Several bug fixes that were found by ourselves and helpful rgp-ers. Game counts weren't updating correctly when the count of games changed. Now it should recount when editing the location or a pin, and of course when a pin is added or deleted. The location's name is now always a link. If the location has a URL entered, the link will be the URL. If not, it googles the name + city & state. This seems to yield pretty satisfactory results for me. Address links didn't work very well... I started with the old Locator's link methodology then crapped it up in my own special way. Maps always seemed to center on a nearby empty field no matter where it was. Now it works a lot better. Game links work now even if the name has an apostrophe in it (what is it with the apostrophes, anyway?). If you edit the last location in the list, you will now return to that location when you go back to the list. August 8 2010 The Big One This is a big update. The most obvious change is the new search results page (which I think looks pretty neat, thanks to some aesthetic advice from Mrs. Entropy) and easier adding & editing. But internally we separated the games from the locations, which lays the foundation for a lot of really cool features, such as distance-based searches and integrated mapping. Also, this one is the 800-pound Congo gorilla of updates... the next batch of features will be a lot smaller and take less time to implement. Also, the location data was pulled from the old Locator's game data, which means that there will be duplicates and minor inconsistencies until I have time to track them down. As always, feel free to make corrections if you see problems in the database. Sadly, there's not a lot of love for our International pals this time around. We'll try to remedy that in the near future. Here's a list of all the features in this update that I can remember: Search results are now listed by location and should be a little nicer to look at. Locations and games are now separate. To add a game, you must first add a location, then add the game to the location. So when you add a new game, you don't have to retype the location info, just the name of the game and some notes. You can do searches by distance from a ZIP code. The distances aren't 100% accurate (especially over larger distances) but it's better than nothing. Distance results are returned sorted by smallest to largest distance. Also, it only works for U.S. locations and not all of the locations have been point coded... I am working on both of these issues, believe me. Locations have the count of games, so you can seach for large numbers of games, allowing you to find the biggest bang bars for your big buck hunters. Locations can either have a game count calculated from the entries in the database or a static count (for large museums, tournaments, or shows where it would be impractical to enter every game). Data entry should go a lot faster. There are no 10 second pauses after writing to the database, and the anti-spam countermeasures are a lot less intrusive and (hopefully) at least a little fun. Your search criteria are passed along with you as you navigate the site, so you can return to the search form with your previous choices already filled in. This should help the process of refining searches. After you've added or edited a location or game, your previous search will be rerun and you'll be taken directly to the location that you were editing (providing it coincides with your search criteria). This should make adding multiple games for a location much easier. Eventually we'll have in-place editing for games and possibly a cool bulk entry feature. Enjoy! Let us know what you like and dislike! Suggest features you would like to see! June 12 2010 Apostrophe's!!! Apostrophes are properly supported! Search for Mousin' Around at John's Place... it works! This was my first bug fix to the Locator, but it was one that annoyed a lot of people (including myself). Of course, it caused a bug, but I found and fixed it -- before I was told about it ^_^; -- and corrected the damage it had done to the database. I'll try to do a little more rigorous testing in the future. Go back