albertw

I'm not 100% clear about that sentence, but rest assured, GC doesn't want their application calling up hundreds of web pages and scraping the data to present in their application, either. There's nothing about the 'scraping' that is desirable from their end. Whether GC is able to duplicate all of the features of C:GEO will in part be a function of whether their own API gives them direct access to enough information to do so without scraping pages. It's not the act of 'scraping' that costs the GC website anything - it's the act of calling up all of the pages to get the data to scrape in the first place. The API provides a more direct and very abbreviated (and possibly not even human readable) version of the requisite data without the enormous overhead of producing a pretty HTML page for you to look at along with it. And if Groundspeak were serious about promoting the growth of the game (and therefore their premium memberships) then they would make a single API that gives everyone the data they need but require authentication for premium members to get additional data. The reason that people have tools the parse the web pages is because Groundspeak have never provided an API. Not having an API was excusable initially, but to still not have it publicly available now is very telling about attitudes at Groundspeak since I doubt the reason is technical inability; the strain on the servers would actually go down if there was an API people could use. This is particularly a pity when all the content that makes geocaching popular and Groundspeak profitable is created by the userbase. Groundspeak needs to take a serious look at itself here. Having been out of the game for a while its surprising to see the age profile of users seems to have gotten older. This game should be full of kids now that they all have GPS's on their phones; but effectively needing to pay $30 for membership plus $10 for an official app (thats is not as good as the free c:geo), plus not letting the geekier ones innovate with an API to program against is not a good thing for the game. I had stopped geogaching for a couple of years and only got back into it thanks to getting an android and c:geo. c:geo is the reason that I decided to take out a premium membership again. I doubt I'm alone and providing an open way for users and members to access data should be part of the Groundspeak business plan and is the single simplest thing the company can do to expand and to expand the game. Sadly since attitudes in Groundspeak don't seem to have changed much from when I was last geocaching I don't think I'll be renewing that membership again unless things open up.

Sorry to see you go guys; especially Eckington who approved my first caches. Hopefully the powers that be will learn something from this. Still, more time for caching now eh?

sTeamTraen - There is no dispute about which counties are in Ulster. There are 9 counties. The province itself dates back to pre written times - well before the formation of the States that are now on the Island. Northern Ireland contains 6 of these counties and the remaining 3 are part of the Republic. The dispute you read about may be this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derry-Londonderry_name_dispute - that's one good reason not to use Irish counties for geocaching! Looking back over the conversation here there has been much discussion of modern administrative provinces and traditional ones. Whatever you do in Northern Ireland please don't use the current 20+ administrative areas! The topic title refers to 'UK Counties'. I would object to any of the above provinces being listed under the country of the UK or a description of British Isles. Personally I think gc.com needs to refine its idea of a country away from a political entity to a grographic one. If we had 'psuedo geographic countries' on gc.com of 'Ireland' and 'Great Britain' that refer to the two main islands and the smaller islands associated with each things would be easier. By all means explain on gc.com that this geographical breakdown is done for geocaching convenience and is making no assertion whatsoever about politics! E.g. a cacher in Antrim could select to see all caches within a 100 km radius and end up getting caches in Scotland; more useful would be the ability to ask for all caches within 100 km and that are on the Island of Ireland. This would then allow the breakdown that Eckington suggested to be used if a more fine grained breakdown is needed. As someone sensibly pointed out earlier people are not being asked to redraw the council tax boundaries! The modern administrative regions need not be what is chosen, what is useful to cachers should be chosen. I suggest we take that one level higher and don't let ourselves be restricted to the political/administrative divisions between countries either and switch to what makes more sense geographically. Cheers, ~Albert p.s. I'll be travelling for the next while and probably won't be able to participate further in the discussion. So sorry for the long post.

+1 for an interface. I've spent the past hour trying to come up with a way to get an accurate leaderboard of the Irish geocachers from their publicly availble data on geocaching.com. While doable, its not pretty, and isn't realy extendable to provide the kind of stats I'd like - most cache finds per month, most counties cached in etc. Some API for accessing the data would be much appreciated. Cheers, ~Al

Hi folks, I noticed a slight inconsistency in users profiles. For example, Fjon (guinea pig for the evening!) has 238 caches according to http://www.geocaching.com/profile/Default....a0-0ab3d66fee80 But if you click on the "All Cache Finds" link, the page says he's only found 237. The locationless cache has been omitted. Can they be included for consistency? Cheers, ~Al

Hi Barry, I noticed the perl modules that you used, but I wanted to create something in php to give the option of using php rather than uploading perl modules to folks who wanted to use it on their websites. It will be interesting to see what wildlifewriter finds with the tools, hopefully his conclusions will not force me to do a complete rewrite! :-) Best Wishes, ~Al

I've been working on a script to do the GPS<-> Irish OS grid conversions. Currently you can test it at http://www.cademuir.net/geocaching.php The source code is in php, so it would be suitable for simple web pages, and is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/iegridconv/ It's still being worked on, so any feedback would be appreciated. It seems accurate to within 5 meters anywhere on the Island. Hopefully this is of some use, I have not looked at the UK algorithm but I understand that it is very different to the Irish one. Cheers, ~Al