TAG :: Toronto Area Geocachers » 2010 » December
Dec 13 2010
Several Toronto area geocachers were interviewed for a new local magazine, Journey ON!. The magazine features articles about travel and adventure in Ontario. northernpenguin (yup, that’s me), teamvoyagr and chris-mouse were interviewed at the BFL Boot Camp event last October.
The caches I referred to in the article are the Tour de Matchedash series, and Languages.
The earthcache is Juicepig’s Sudbury Astrobleme
You can view the magazine online here, or skip right to the article text here.
The magazine is also embedded below, if you can view Adobe Flash content:
Dec 13 2010
If you’d like to see COG Spring Fling 7 get a Souvenir on Geocaching.com, now there’s a place where you can vote for that.
Spring Fling is hosted annually by Central Ontario Geocachers, and it’s Ontario’s local Mega Event, held just north of the City. Even if you don’t upvote the Souvenir, set aside June 11, 2011 to attend the event, it is one of Ontario’s premier annual event caches.
Dec 10 2010
Groundspeak has opened up a section on the feedback site for picking out the next souvenirs. Souvenirs are little FourSquare like achievement badges that show up on your profile when you complete a certain task – like logging a geocache in a given area, or at a certain event.
Here’s a list of all the active Souvenirs
If you have an active account on Geocaching.com, you can head on over and see the list that everyone’s pitching, and vote for the ones you’d like
Dec 10 2010
We’ve completed the migration for the TAG Forums to Bluehost, and now they’re back online. Thanks for being patient folks!
UPDATE: Now all of our previous articles have been migrated from the decommissioned server.
Dec 09 2010
There’s an interesting thread that popped up in the Groundspeak forums today. We’ve known since the November site update that cache ratings are on their way. Now, we have a date – Dec 31.
In the feedback system, a quote was made by Jeremy Irish, that indicates we’ll be seeing a form of a rating system by the end of the year
We will complete our first attempt at a rating system by the end of the month. In lieu of a generic (and IMO unhelpful) 1-5 star rating system we have decided to let people rate a percentage of their finds as their favorites.
This favorite count will then be displayed on the cache listing. The beta feature will initially be introduced to Premium Members but will eventually opened up to all users.
We will also be exploring other ways to identify the best caches to encourage quality. Quality of the game is one of the major themes for 2011.
Now, this could be seen as a rushed response to Garmin’s 1-5 “awesomeness” rating system. It will be far simpler, being the Groundspeak equivalent of a “Like” button. You can favourite a certain percentage of your finds, and the number of “Favourites” will be visible on the cache page. No word about being able to filter on this yet.
One thing we do know from the November release notes is that this was planned before the Opencaching site came out of the woodwork. At the end of the day, it’s the geocaching community that will win out.
Dec 09 2010
I’ve been following some interesting posts on Itsnotaboutthenumbers about Opencaching.com and it’s lack of reviewers. The blog owner posted two caches with the same co-ordinates to demonstrate that a site without reviewers would be an oversaturation nightmare. The caches were popped back to “Draft” status by someone, or perhaps the site has a “bot” that checks caches and distance.
The Opencaching.com site has guidelines, but without the reviewers in place like Groundspeak has, how are these guidelines going to be enforced? A distance based one is easy enough, just run a script that checks cache distances and “unapproves” the newest one. That’s easy. The guidelines call for a minimum of 0.1 mile between caches (gee, the Geocaching site offers this information in metric too…..)
Now, we have caches in places like Ontario Parks – who have banned the activity. Let’s say Garmin has all the shapefiles for the Parks and can run a similar script. Same with railways and highway bridges.
Quick, without reviewers, how to you remove a cache that is buried in a cemetery? In a sensitive ecosystem? Without permission?
How do you notify the powers that be that the cache is inappropriate? There is no “Should be archived” log type on Opencaching.com. There’s no reviewer address to email. There is a “check box” that the “Cache needs attention from it’s owner”.
With no obvious method to restrict a cache that just plain old should not exist, one can present the position that regardless of Opencaching’s “Awesome” rating system, Groundspeak’s value add may simply boil down to better quality hides at the end of the day – lamp posts and all.
Dec 08 2010
Well, here’s an interesting little tidbit. The day before Opencaching.com launched, Groundspeak announced they’re taking the entire site – the whole kit and kaboole – offline next Tuesday night for a major infrastructure upgrade. That’s everything from Geocaching.com, to the smartphone apps, to Waymarking. If it’s a Groundspeak site, it’ll be offline.
Elias posted in This Thread :
As Groundspeak and Geocaching.com have grown, the demands on our production network infrastructure have increased significantly. As a result, on Tuesday December 14, 2010 at 8:00 PM PST (GMT -8), we will be performing a number of major upgrades to our production network. These upgrades include a new network design as well as new hardware to help increase the performance, scalability, and security of the network.
We’re estimating that the downtime may take up to 6 hours, and during that time, all Groundspeak sites and services including Geocaching.com, the Groundspeak Forums, Pocket Queries, Geocaching Mobile Applications, and other 3rd party applications that access our API will be inaccessible.
While we’re giving ourselves a 6 hour window to cover anything unexpected that might come up, we’ll be doing everything possible to minimize the downtime and are confident that we’ll have the site back up much sooner.
When combined with the Opencaching.com launch timing, one starts to wonder just what Groundspeak will be making happen at the Lillypad? Are we just looking at scaling the servers to handle over 1 million active geocache listings, or are we seeing some of the chess pieces for the Garmin vs Groundspeak front being moved into place?
Garmin has already launched a few salvos with the site, the easy import from Groundspeak via GPX tools and that 5,000 cache at a time API access which could load up an Oregon 550 with one click. Perhaps in the background Groundspeak is gearing up for the massive hit an official Geocaching.com API would place on their servers.
The release notes on Wednesday morning should be an interesting read
Dec 07 2010
Opencaching.com comes with something interesting. An Application Programming Interface. This means that third party developers can make applications that work with cache data on that site. The possibilities range from the obvious – smartphone clients will most likely appear for the site very quickly – to the more creative. You could potentially have websites tracking challenges like a Fizzy matrix without the need for a local GSAK install.
Groundspeak has countered (via Moun10bike) that they have been planning an API since before they heard about. Opencaching, and hope to launch it in early 2011.
I know from my visits to the Groundspeak forums, this is a sore point for the caching community. We have terms like “the application which must not be named” when discussing third party caching applications that utilize the Groundspeak data. Now Garmin’s offering is compelling as they are embracing third party developers rather than sabre rattling toward those developers who fill a niche before(/instead of) Groundspeak does. For example, there is a very real possibility that an application like GCzII will support Garmin’s offering while use of that same app potentially risks getting your user account banned for a Terms of Use violation at Geocaching.com.
2011 is shaping up to be an interesting year for geocachers!
Dec 07 2010
Garmin has launched Opencaching.com, the competitive listing site to Groundspeak’s geocaching.com. The site promises to work with any GPS or site that uses GPX files. Already there is a mixed reaction from the geocaching community. While some are resistant to the site, it does provide one of the more polished and compelling alternatives to Groundspeak.
What struck me right off the bat was how easy they have made it to search and filter. Punch in a place name like “Toronto, Ontario” and you’re presented with a Google Map like interface and there’s a button on the screen to grab all the caches on the map. This is much easier to communicate to a beginner than the search options at Geocaching.com are. What I particularly like is that you can bookmark a search result and email the link to other cachers, just like Google Maps.
For seasoned geocachers, there is a procedure to automatically pull over all your finds and all your hides in one quick step. Existing geocaches change from GCXXXX to OMXXXX so there won’t be any confusion with the listing on the Groundspeak site.
Over the next few days I’ll be investigating the site, and sharing any gems I find along the way.
Dec 07 2010
Well, it goes to show that web servers can tell when you are up to something. As such, the moment I signed up for a better hosting package, the old one fell down on it’s knees. What this means is for the next little while, until I can drive over there and retrieve the old website data, is that the archived stories up to this point and the TAG Forums are offline.
I’ll have them back as soon as possible and I’ve taken steps to ensure the site will be far more robust by moving it to Bluehost.