WitzAbout

I am seeing a problem with logging wherigos. I have had a number of people trying to log on Wherigo, and are unable to enter a log after successfully completing the cartridge. I can not even post a note. The last time someone successfully logged on the Wherigo page was 12/24/2010. For example, clicking on the 'Write Log' link at the bottom of the cartridge page, is linked to URL: http://www.Wherigo.com/logs/log.aspx?CGUID=3b279ef9-0e83-4473-8ae3-77af3ce92c94 Comes back with the generic Groundspeak error page (Geocaching, Waymarking and Wherigo icons at the top), and the URL shows: http://www.Wherigo.com/error/err.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/logs/log.aspx

I just noticed that wasn't working on a cache that just had the last trackable removed. Now I can't see what had been in that cache. The words are blue like a link, and change color when you mouse-over - but there is no underline, no finger icon, and no link when you click. To check further, I went to a page with trackables, and clicked on the links: "View all Trackables" and "View past Trackables" The first only returned 8 trackables, and the first line shows a brown error message: "No results were found for your search." The second link returned 707 records, but also showed the brown error message: "No results were found for your search."

Tried email again - and I see now that there is a script error showing up for IE: Line: 334 Char 17 Error: "console' is undefined

Some really great updates! Thanks for lots of great changes! Quick notes: + kiosk first page shows not logged in - logging in does not log in - just takes you back to the 'Caches Nearby' link. Link works fine + Title on kiosk/cachesnearby.aspx is URL + Go to Email results/instructions does not seem to work. Not sure if it completed first time, but never got email. Went back to page, and clicking email shows spinny - but spinny just stays on screen never completing. XP - IE7

I'm having that problem in 'Newest in Colorado' page 1 Windows XP IE7 & Windows Vista Chrome (and IE8 & Firefox too I think) http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?state_id=6 Returns a page with no caches listed, just the rest of the page, includingL Total Records 12081 - Page 1 of 605 Clicking next gives second page, which does seem to have accurate data, but shows in the top box: 'This constraint cannot be enabled as not all values have corresponding parent values.' above the words 'New Search' Also getting the same issue when I click on nearest caches from home coordinate: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.asp...amp;lng=-104.75 (digits truncated to 2 decimal places for this forurm entry)

Beta site sounds like a useful thing

If that was the idea, then I could have just put out a cache, and skipped the Wherigo aspect. We have a number of people in the area who are known to do lots to shortcut on caches. I wanted to make sure that anybody who did this first Wherigo cache did actually go through the whole Wherigo. Maybe later on or on other Wherigos I won't care as much - but for the first one, I though it important that cachers knew they had to do it correctly. Think about it. If you went through the trouble of setting up a 6 caches with clues to a 7th final puzzle cache, but everybody after the first cacher only went to the 7th cache without going to find the clues. I know I wouldn't be happy. But you do have a good point! There should be some way to log the cache when you log the Wherigo cartridge - both at the same time.

I made the first Wherigo Geocache for Colorado a few weeks ago. While it took a lot of work making the first one, it was fun and interesting. And overall, I've gotten some very positive feedback. To help reduce armchair cheating, I require the user to enter a code visable in the real world into the cart before it will give them the final cache location and flag the cartridge internally as completed. I posted on the web page how to upload the saved, completed cartridge to log the cartridge which is required to be able to log the geocache page. I even put that I would delete logs from the geocache page if they did not log the cartridge on the Wherigo page. And yet, almost every one has not uploaded the cartridge page until I reminded them, often more than once, to upload the cartridge. I went back to the cache description and said they must log the cartridge before they can log the geocache. I've been nice so far, but it is frustraiting. How many of those cachers would try to log a virtual without sending the email? Anyway, enough soap-boxing. Part of what makes it harder to verify cartridge completion is that there does not seem to be an email from players logging a Wherigo cart. I am seriously missing this feature! It is there for caches and for waymarks, but I don't see it for Wherigo. I hope it is on the list to be added soon! Thanks!

I've been caching for over 3 years now. Up until jsut a couple of months ago, I'd always used a low-end eTrex. The first 1.5 years I had units without WAAS error correction. I've tried routing car GPS units when driving other's vehicles, and enjoyed the ability to drive to an address or point-of-interest (stores, restaruants, etc). But most of them can not easily be set to get you to a cache location. So I finally bought a Garmin Colorado 300 in the last couple of months. While there are issues with it, overall I'm rather happy with it. I love being able to route to caches! But I find that I usually have to change modes when I'm looking for a cache. Not hard when you set up shortcuts correctly. This past weekend, I did some power caching. I had set out a pre-set route to travel - but I found myself not being able to use the route much, I jsut went to the next nearest cache. And I used the eTrex to find a lot of the caches. Though I did take out the Colorado a couple of times to get better coordinates and descriptions. I love the ease of loading caches onto the Colorado. I love the ease of logging caches when loading back from the Colorado. And being able to add notes in the field is a great aid when logging online later! Of course, the spin-method of spelling can be a bit cumbersome. I wonder if the Oregon makes that a snap? I even have started to occasionally spell asyncronously! Ex LAMP - cursor over to second character, A; Cursor back twice to first letter, L; Cursor over to character 3, M; then finish with P. Anybody else starting to spell out-of-order because of the Colorado? The 300 has less memory - but it will take large SD cards, which can make up for the smaller built-in memory. I have a number of SD cards so I can switch what cache sets I see when out in the field. I have a card for my partner's unfound cache and another for all local caches, for when I want to make sure I'm not hiding too close to another cache. I did wind up having to reformat most of my SD cards to get them to be read by the Colorado in GPS mode (it worked fine in card-reader mode). But the main thing that pushed me over the line was the Wherigo. I wanted to be able to play and create Wherigo adventures. So far, I have the first and only Wherigo cache in Colorado - the GPS's namesake! My biggest concern was battery usage. I saw a friend seem to go through batteries more than twice the rate of the eTrex. But now I have 2 sets of rechargable AAs that I swap out. Usually one set is good for a full day of caching. And the fact that it takes regular AAs means I can swap to store-bought if I get in a pinch.

Yes, I have been frustrated by these things a number of times. I have found one way of going to my own bookmark entry for a specific cache: Click to bookmark the cache (again) Make sure to have the same bookmark list the cache is in already selected in the drop down. Submit to add the cache to the bookmark list. It will then come back and say the cache is already bookmarked - but will then give you a link at the bottom in red: Click the Edit this Bookmark link A bit of a kludge, but it can be the fastest way to get to the correct bookmark entry. I wish there was a link to edit the bookmark directly from the cache page. Hopefully some day!

I have found that the pocket query page does not really save the Selected Exclude Attributes unless you have at least one matching Positive/Negative Include Attribute. When you do the submit on a PQ with exludes, the screen comes back and it looks like your options are selected. But when you go back to the PQ list and come back in, all the selected excluded attributes are removed (page refresh does not show this issue, as it will only allow a repost and show the same data, however you can put a space on the end of the URL on the address line to re-fetch the page as a Get instead of a Post). The matching Positive/Negative is interesting. I've tested it a bit. To have any Negative Exludes (one of the attribute icons that you can click again and get a red slash across), you must have a Negative Include. To have any Positive Excludes, you must have a Positive Include. For example, lets say you select the following: Include: Not for kids (slashed) Include: Less than an hour Exlcude: Not for dogs (slashed) Exlcude: Snakes This works fine, as there is a match for positive and a match for negative (slashed). But if you then remove the Include: Not for kids (and the submit, then come back into the page) the Exclude: Not for dogs will also have disappeared! Then if you remove Include: Less than an hour, the Exclude: Snakes will be removed. So it turns out those pocket queries I tried to run to exclude caches with any of the following attributes: Parking-fee, Climbing-gear, Boat, Scuba, Big-hike, Big-climb - did not exluded those items as I did not have any include items. Nor can I think of any attribute that I can use reliably on the include list to get around the issue. So I hope to hear you can fix this one soon. Thanks!!

You can get a lot of the data from Groundspeak by running pocket queries - such as the my-finds pocket query - which are also in XML, the same as RSS. Though I bet an RSS reader would not be happy with the raw file, it might not be hard to create a converter for the XML data.

Being a coder myself, I am sure that is what happened - I just wanted to let them know so they could patch it when they had a chance - and I think this is the way to let them know. If there is a better method for helping keep the system running well, I would welcome the info.

Going into a banner image... when you select either of these links: Visit the Larger Banner Gallery Visit the Smaller Banner Gallery They come up under the category 'Travel Bugs': Hirearchy links says: "Home > Travel Bugs > Gallery" Blue background title says: "Travel Bug Gallery" Also, the links near the top of these pages and the TB gallery pages: Latest Banner Images (150x135) Latest Banner Images (280x120) Travel Bug Gallery Do not go to images/gallery: Latest Banner... just goes to GC home (okay, that shows the banner, so it does make some sense). TB goes to Track a travelbug, not the gallery. It seems like those are more titles than links - perhaps they should not be links or should be renamed a little? Thanks! Keith aka Mr.WitzAbout

I found this topic late, and was going to list the CITO event that I posted and organized. I was scrolling down looking at the others, and to my surprise, I found my event was already posted! It seems the local chapter head SAXman beat me to it by a loooong time. Thanks for posting the event SAXman! Another take on the event from my geocaching blog: http://witzabout.blogspot.com/2006/04/gcty...sunday-423.html

Sounds good - thanks for the info! Yup - the middle one had 2 finds

I was viewing the caches a user found, and noticed something odd http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?ul=soozieque It says they found 4 caches, and the Total records on the page says 4 twice - but I only see 3! Not a big deal - but an interesting oddity that may need a fix

Sorry to beat a dead horse - but on the topic of a misc waypoint... I went to add the coordinates for a pre-event lunch meeting place to my CITO - and didn't know which catagory to put it under. I wound up picking 'stages of a multicache' - not a very good match, but it would have to do. I alway put in descriptions, so having a misc catagory would have been useful in this case as well. Just another thing to chew on

Colorado has 2 planned for the weekend. One outside Denver on Saturday 4/22, the other I planned for downtown Colorado Springs on Sunday 4/23. There was another one planned for the outskirts of Colorado Springs - it was a place that needed a clean-up much more than the spot I picked - it is an unregulated gun range. But it seems that a boy scout had dibs on the area around that time. The local geocachers were willing to work with the boy scout to get more muscle on this clean up. The page was changed on GC. And then a few days later, the page was made to disappear. The admin had a good point, GC has a policy of effectively not showing favoritism. It is just a shame there wasn't some way that it could have been worked out. Mr.WitzAbout

Hi - I see my suggestion for moving the hints to just below the long description, and the waypoints below it (hiding the additional waypoints heading if no unhidden waypoints exist) change just made it to the web site. I did notice a minor formatting problem - If a page has no waypoints, but does have an encrypted hint. and the web page is smaller than about 900px, then the Encryption key and image-map push into the find... section http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...04-aa276b0b6f6a

Mr.WitzAbout - Mainframe Programmer - looking for a way to get paid to geocache full time! Mrs.WitzAbout - Massage Therapist === Mr.WitzAbout in the past: TV repair delivery/Jr Tech; Warehouse; Medical Equipment Assembler; Mainframe Support; Unix Programmer; Unix+NT Admin; Web admin; PC-Tech; Web+Database programmer; Homeschool Teacher Mrs.WitzAbout in the past: Teacher; Head Teacher; Sales; Homeschool Teacher + Principal

Yes - I'd say it would be a reference point or reference coordiante - 'reference point' is less of a mouthful Thanks for taking the suggestions!

Just offhand I can think of a use for other - a waypoint that would be used for bearing/distance. Thus it might not be a place you have to go, just triangulate from, or navigate based on the coordinate. A couple of quick additional notes on waypoints, if I may: 1) The 'Additional Waypoints' heading shows up on a cache if any waypoints are entered - even if all the waypoints are hidden. That means there is heading with no details below in some cases. As an example, I just created a hidden waypoint on my event that has past: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GCT3CF 2) I would suggest that the 'Additional Waypoints' section on a cache page should be moved down one section below 'Additional Hints'. To me, additional hints is a 3rd type of description, and should be just below the long description. Thanks! Keith aka Mr.WitzAbout

I've set up a group for cachers South of Denver (and West of the Divide): COSGEO

While there is some overlap in the lists, I found some people had put together lists of caches-from-home bookmarks: Couch Caching (11) by ODragon http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...35-caff28a22b7e Armchair Caches (52) Haggis Hunter http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...0d-247765c51c2e Couch Caches (57) by Packman5 http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...93-e018de74b5dd No Need To Leave Home Cache (8) by pascoa http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...7a-b71b21c381e0 Couch Caching (64) by chstress53 http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...4e-318c1fde3ce0 Angie's Arm Chair Caches (13) by AngieTheHiker http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...1d-c877e8f7b26d Rainy day caches (3) by cainrcc http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...36-210c890e0fa0 Google Caches (61) by hulmgulm http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.a...b7-63c3999d5bb4 --- A home-video game does sound interesting. Maybe it would be allowed as a whole sub-topic of Waymarking: log locations found on a video - or perhaps famous locations by movies (or is there one already?) Mr.WitzAbout