This is really beautiful. One of the most moving things I've seen in weeks. The website and the comments and just the idea of memorial benches.
I'm very surprised it was able to get this much traction despite being launched only 8 years ago, long after the heyday of these sort of sites. How'd you do it?
OK, it was a mixture of things. I told my friends about it and they were sufficiently nerdy to try it out.
I responded to early feedback - specifically about creating a leaderboard. Originally it was all anonymous but people wanted to see how well they'd done.
My wife and I gave an interview to a local BBC radio station which gave it a little bump. Similarly, when it is mentioned on reddit and other sites we pop up and talk about it.
It was also picked up by a couple of academic papers, which gave it a bit of credibility. As did our recent integration with OpenStreetMap.
There's a far amount of schema.org metadata which probably helps with SEO.
But, other than that, who knows? I've had plenty of projects which didn't do as well. Sometimes the Web rewards nice things.
I see my area is lacking dispite having many memorial benches. Unfortunately some are in poor condition. I will try my best to capture and record them. Great project. Will encourage others.
For almost 20 years, I've wanted to build a site where users can upload photos of informational boards/plaques along the road (e.g. on highways), along with photos of the actual item the board was talking about. The idea was that you could browse a map, and see all the ones along the route you were thinking of traveling, and decide which spots were worth stopping at.
In those days there were no cell phones, and I didn't know much web development. Now, with GPS embedded into photos, this is perhaps a really easy site to build.
But I don't want to deal with user moderation. And I don't want the burden of continual maintenance.
I was also concerned that a side effect would be really nice, not frequently visited spots will suddenly overflow with tourists. A much tougher problem to crack.
I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Someone convince me otherwise. Or better yet, build it for me. :-)
We use Auth0 for authentication - people editing have to use a social network to log in. That significantly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the need for moderation.
As for maintenance - once in a while dependabot will say a PHP library is out of date and I'll run the update.
> The idea was that you could browse a map, and see all the ones along the route you were thinking of traveling, and decide which spots were worth stopping at.
Strava has something like this, not specifically for informational boards/plaques. People with public profiles can have their uploaded photos of (usually) trail markers, plaques, rickety bridges/stairs/rocks, big trees etc added to a community map so others can see whats on a trail or route they want to walk/run.
I take the exact photos you are talking about and have them uploaded to my trail activities -- though I keep my profile private, more of a historical record for myself. I've wondered if others were into taking/saving photos of all the ones they come across. I see others reading and moving on or taking a selfie, but am usually the only one trying to get photos of the board/plaque and the objects it was pointing out
Marvelous stuff. Appreciate the tips on the technologies used to stay abreast of the new regulations. I always thought it was a pity we were going to start losing comments and am glad to see that it's still feasible to keep them.
I was reading over a comment thread on songfacts.com a few days ago and thought to myself "this is what the internet was supposed to be". People from all over the world connecting to discuss their favorite music, across time and space, without any upvoting, downvoting, likes, followers, or other systems to game for popularity.
Without upvotes/likes/etc. as a "quality filter", you tend to read more comments written in broken English with poor grammar and so forth. I consider that an acceptable price to pay, in exchange for no viral memes, ragebaiting, etc.
Thought this was going to lead to something about a major annoyance or weird commenters but pleasantly surprised at the list of impacts, heartfelt, emotive, human experiences connecting community from the physical to the virtual (to the otherworldly no doubt).
There are a lot of trees with similar sort of sponsorships and commemorations... wonder if a spin off would be something like opentreebutes.org ?
Yeah, I likewise thought this was going to be about people being brutally unpleasant - commenting to laugh at the dead, to pour scorn on their families, that sort of thing.
I am jaded. Then again I come from a family where people go to funerals to gloat and start fights.
I'm very surprised it was able to get this much traction despite being launched only 8 years ago, long after the heyday of these sort of sites. How'd you do it?
OK, it was a mixture of things. I told my friends about it and they were sufficiently nerdy to try it out.
I responded to early feedback - specifically about creating a leaderboard. Originally it was all anonymous but people wanted to see how well they'd done.
My wife and I gave an interview to a local BBC radio station which gave it a little bump. Similarly, when it is mentioned on reddit and other sites we pop up and talk about it.
It was also picked up by a couple of academic papers, which gave it a bit of credibility. As did our recent integration with OpenStreetMap.
There's a far amount of schema.org metadata which probably helps with SEO.
But, other than that, who knows? I've had plenty of projects which didn't do as well. Sometimes the Web rewards nice things.
In those days there were no cell phones, and I didn't know much web development. Now, with GPS embedded into photos, this is perhaps a really easy site to build.
But I don't want to deal with user moderation. And I don't want the burden of continual maintenance.
I was also concerned that a side effect would be really nice, not frequently visited spots will suddenly overflow with tourists. A much tougher problem to crack.
I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Someone convince me otherwise. Or better yet, build it for me. :-)
https://github.com/openbenches/openbenches.org/
It is fairly standard PHP + MySQL.
We use Auth0 for authentication - people editing have to use a social network to log in. That significantly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the need for moderation.
As for maintenance - once in a while dependabot will say a PHP library is out of date and I'll run the update.
Please do launch your project; it sounds like fun
Strava has something like this, not specifically for informational boards/plaques. People with public profiles can have their uploaded photos of (usually) trail markers, plaques, rickety bridges/stairs/rocks, big trees etc added to a community map so others can see whats on a trail or route they want to walk/run.
I take the exact photos you are talking about and have them uploaded to my trail activities -- though I keep my profile private, more of a historical record for myself. I've wondered if others were into taking/saving photos of all the ones they come across. I see others reading and moving on or taking a selfie, but am usually the only one trying to get photos of the board/plaque and the objects it was pointing out
Without upvotes/likes/etc. as a "quality filter", you tend to read more comments written in broken English with poor grammar and so forth. I consider that an acceptable price to pay, in exchange for no viral memes, ragebaiting, etc.
There are a lot of trees with similar sort of sponsorships and commemorations... wonder if a spin off would be something like opentreebutes.org ?
I am jaded. Then again I come from a family where people go to funerals to gloat and start fights.