Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

by _ompc • 14 years ago

31 33 14 years ago

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Now with much more data!

I submitted my hobby project Days Out Near Me a few weeks back. I've tried to take on a lot of the great feedback I've had and I've made a number of big improvements to how it works. The site's goal is to aggregate a lot of events & venues for days out into one searchable database. It now grabs data from National Trust, English Heritage, The Forestry Commission, Cadw, and National Museum Wales. I'm working on support for people to submit their own events/places (which is one of the primary goals of the site).

I'd really like some more feedback and advice from people; what I've had so far has been great but I want as much as possible to help me improve the application and provide a great service to users. This is the first personal project I've launched and I'd be incredibly grateful for any/all feedback.

maxjaderberg• 14 years ago

just a design point - i find the black on dark green background quite uncomfortably hard to read on my screen!

robotmay17• 14 years ago

You should have seen the inverse ;)

I'm constantly playing with the design and I've also found it can be a bit bright; I'll be looking to refine it soon.

oracuk• 14 years ago

This is a great site, will likely be very handy for me over the summer.

Couple of things that immediately jumped out as useful additions for my particular use case: 1) A 'family friendly' filter on places 2) A 'kids' filter on events 3) A filter based on distance 4) Even better a filter based on how long it takes to drive to the event or the place (maybe using Google Maps directions estimates?)

I'm definitely going to use this over the next few weeks.

robotmay17• 14 years ago

1/2: This is something I really want to implement, as finding family days out is one of my main goals. 3: In the works! 4: I've had this suggestion before and I think it'd be a great feature; I'm looking into it :D

Thanks for the feedback!

wgx• 14 years ago

All places: http://daysoutnearme.com/places seems to return results in a strange order - it's not alphabetical?

UI: Items with 'August' in their date make the panel break onto a newline

Items with an email could auto mailto: link the email http://daysoutnearme.com/events/simply-walk-2012-05-03

Print button on item: print preview opens with the body copy overlaying the map (print media query?)

Browsing around on the map doesn't reload pins for the area you browse to, they stay as the /hubs/city you selected

UI: All events http://daysoutnearme.com/events could use a lick of paint.

Bravo! Finding it hard to fault, hence the nitpick comments above. :)

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Ah yes, I (slightly) forgot about the /places and /events pages, as they were mostly added in for SEO purposes. They're next on my list to tidy up, however!

I need to figure out a better format for the dates, as there are a number of possibilities that will cause it to wrap. I was thinking about truncating the month name if it's too long.

In theory they should have maintained the links/email links from the source copy but I think my HTML filter is a bit too strong (also note the lack of paragraphs). It's on the to-do list :)

Print stylesheet is on its way soon!

Browsing around the map is a work in progress; at the moment it shows the places currently shown in the list below, but I definitely want it to list everything and pull them in as you browse.

Thanks for the feedback!

arethuza2• 14 years ago

Can I suggest adding data from Historic Scotland - I'm sitting looking out my office window at a huge castle sitting on an old volcano and it's not on your list:

http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/

Also, might be worth adding the five Scottish ski centers to your list of things to do - they generally need all the help they can get regarding publicity. The Winterhighland site is excellent:

http://www.winterhighland.info/

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Historic Scotland is the next source I'll be pulling in; I was up in Stirling last year and there's some seriously nice castles up there to visit.

Ski centres are something I hadn't considered but would fit very well with the idea of the site. Thanks for the suggestions! :)

arethuza2• 14 years ago

Actually, now I think of it, what I would really like is a site a bit like Geograph but for "places of interest" rather than just for photos.

NB Geograph is awesome: http://www.geograph.org.uk/

philjones88• 14 years ago

Really good, I'd suggest pulling data from here for Bristol:

http://visitbristol.co.uk/things-to-do

Particularly page:

http://visitbristol.co.uk/things-to-do/attractions

Has the things like the zoo, aquarium, ss great britian and so on.

robotmay17• 14 years ago

I always forget how much there is in Bristol; this (and any other city tourist sites people recommend) will go in my queue to pull data from!

andrewaylett• 14 years ago

You might want to filter your gazetteer search results better: searching for "Ipswich" gave me a town in Australia, and searching for "Norwich" gave me a town in the US...

To reproduce, click the "Ipswich" link on the homepage, then put your cursor in the location box at the top-right and hit enter.

Nice for the places that have data, though :).

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Gah, I thought I'd fixed all those odd locations. I'm using Nomanatim for geocoding, which seems to pick up a lot of the 'new world' locations rather than the originals - I'll go through them all again later and fix the wrong ones!

mike-cardwell2• 14 years ago

I stuck "Nottingham" in the "Location" field, and "Castle" in the "Keywords" field. It didn't mention the castle in the middle of Nottingham :(

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Do you know which organisation runs it? I have a feeling that I'm missing a number of English Heritage properties, which I'm working on.

mike-cardwell2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately not. There's a load of info about it here though: http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1036 - Might be in there somewhere

jgrahamc• 14 years ago

You might like to pull data from Nerdy Day Trips: http://www.nerdydaytrips.com/ as well.

Also, if you'd like lat/long information for all the UK places in my book, The Geek Atlas, I'd be happy to supply.

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Ooh, I've not seen Nerdy Day Trips before; I'll have to get in touch and see if they have an API (probably a better chance than the others I've been working on).

Location data like that would be very useful (and I'd be very grateful for it), as it would help resolve a number of issues with geocoding some of these places. There's probably a castle or two that are registered as being in a terraced street, for example :D

jasiek• 14 years ago

Useful, I'd definitely use it. Can you change the background color to something less gloomy? :)

robotmay17• 14 years ago

It seems to vary wildly depending on monitors; on my Mac it's bright grass-green, on my desktop it seems to be more of a muted snot. It's on my list of things to fix!

withakay• 14 years ago

Handy site, I have noticed the pagination doesn't seem to work though :(

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Does it not work anywhere or in one specific area? I'll take a look into it straight away :)

fiznool• 14 years ago

Awesome project. One of those things I can see will be really useful.

One suggestion: make it responsive. The design lends itself well to mobilising: shrink the map view, put the columns into tabs, etc. This would be an even better resource for using when you are out and about, especially as it could use the HTML5 geolocation API to work out where you are and what is close by.

Great work!

robotmay17• 14 years ago

I toyed with the idea of making it responsive when I first built the layout but opted for a fixed design to save on time. It's a feature I'd really like to get into the site soon as I've already felt the pain of navigating it on my own phone.

Thanks for the great feedback :)

Produce• 14 years ago

The green background is too dark to have black text on it, not enough contrast. Either make the background lighter or darker with white text.

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Thanks for the response! I've mentioned in another comment that the green seems to vary wildly on different displays, so I'm looking into improvements I can make there.

polshaw• 14 years ago

Very nice, great design. I've often considered this an opportunity.. although managing the events to a high standard is a difficult challenge (perhaps consider (carefully) some element of crowd-sourcing?).

What I would like to see, is some way to get photos related to a place/event (some of their own websites had none). I might usually get them from google maps (either streetview or images w/ location).. but a different approach could work too (image search?).

Another possibility would be to add walks.

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Aye, managing the events/places is the trickiest part at the moment. One of my main goals is to have people submitting their own events/places or submitting those they know of near them; I can't index everything by myself, unfortunately! I'm working on an admin panel which will allow me to moderate submissions to help keep it clean and helpful.

In theory a lot of the places (and events too if they have past versions of the same event) will show photos from Flickr. It matches on the Flickr place ID and pulls in photos mentioning the name in that area. However it does mean that a number of places have no photos, which I'd love to improve upon. Allowing people to add their own photos might be a good improvement.

I'm trying to think of a way of including things like walks; data that is neither a place nor an event, but something to do at a place/in an area. I'm currently listing activities (although they don't match up to every record yet) as general terms, but I'd like to find a way to list more specific activities!

Thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated :)

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

Nice! Good work!

Some of your look-up details are a bit off though, if I click 'Newcastle' I get a list of things so we'll pick 'Get Outdoors and Dirty' as it's the first, and quite frankly who can say no to getting dirty. If you go into Newcastle it says 7 miles, which seems about right, however if you type Middlesbrough into the search box it'll also list it but it's about 20 miles off (38 miles vs about 59ish in real life).

robotmay17• 14 years ago

Thanks for the feedback!

The geocoding can be a little odd at times and I'm keeping track of things like this to help me improve it. The first thing I'll do is ensure that all the city/area links on the homepage point to more or less the center of that city/area; some seem to be in very odd places. Any reports like this are really useful :D

Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

Related Stories