Waymark Bookmark Category

[+MountainWoods]

When I started Waymarking, I was surprised to find that there was no feature similar to Geocaching's bookmark feature, whereby someone could group a list of Waymarks based on some common critera. The Waymarking hierarchy groups Waymarks in similar genres, but in widely ranged geography, and that is all. What I really wanted to see was a way to group by any specified critera, rather than genre. Examples:

 

• Waymarks to Visit in a 3-day Excursion in Barry County, MO
  
• All Library Waymarks in Stark County, IL
  
• Fred's Recommended Historic Places in Lancaster County, PA
  
• Country Churches Along the Lincoln Highway, USA
  

 

and so on.

 

Almost right away it occured to me that such a thing could be done, without requesting a new feature from Groundspeak, by simply having a Waymark Bookmark category whose properties were as follows:

 

• Name: A meaningful name for the Bookmark, as in the above examples
  
• Coordinates: Anything meaningful to the Bookmark, such as a starting point, or a main headquarters, or rallying point, etc.
  
• Short description: A bit more of an explanation of the Bookmark
  
• Description: Each line would only consist of two fields:
  A short name
  A URL
  

The poster could either use plain text, or HTML, as usual. If HTML is used, the line need only look like the short name, which is actually the URL link itself. Thus, a description might look like one of the following: (ignore the actual waymarks below, which were picked at random):

 

---

Description (plain):

Fairview, MO Fire Department (visit link)

Jolly Bethel Church, Barry County, MO (visit link)

...

---

Description (for us HTMLers):

Fairview, MO Fire Department

Jolly Bethel Church, Barry County, MO

...

---

A Bookmark Waymark must reference at least two other waymarks. After all, it is intended to group Waymarks based on some critera.

 

The Bookmark Waymark owner would record visiting requirements for their individual Bookmark Waymark, with category suggestions like:

• After visiting at least one Waymark in this Bookmark Waymark, you may register a Visit on this Waymark.
  
• After you have visited all of the waymarks in this Bookmark Waymark, please "register" the fact by visiting this waymark!
  
• After you have visited the waymarks that you intended to visit in this Bookmark Waymark, please visit this Waymark.
  

This would be recorded in the only Variable for the Bookmark Waymark, which would be Required so that the Waymark Owner cannot leave it blank, and have a hapless "visitor" fill in their own Visit Requirements! The category would require a minimum of a visit of at least one referenced Waymark before the Bookmark Waymark can be Visited. Beyond that is at the discretion of the Bookmark Waymark poster.

 

Officers would only need to check that the Description is truly a set of lines with a name and link ONLY (no pictures, no extra prose -- since the short description took care of that). That is, even though the Waymark Description is usually free-format text, for the purpose of a Bookmark Waymark, it should be a table with either two columns (plain text) or one column (HTML). Waymarks without that format, including Waymarks with no links in the Description, or missing short names, or links to anything that is not a Waymark, would be declined.

 

The limit on the bookmark would simply be based on the existing limit of characters within a Waymark Description.

 

Your Bookmark Waymark may definitely reference someone else's Waymark(s). No problem. In fact, Waymarker A should feel honored if Waymarker B includes a reference to A's Waymark(s) in B's Bookmark Waymark. It's just a Bookmark after all.

 

What do you think?

Edited September 6, 2014 by MountainWoods

[+MountainWoods]

The "Groupies" group is now enrolling.

[+Bear and Ragged]

Sounds a bit like "Lucky 7" except the 7 have to be in different departments...

 

http://www.Waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=2a0f9fd5-bb3a-49c7-8463-176266b05b2c

 

This is a Waymark game to find at least seven Waymarks in a given radius. You can find and submit more than seven, but you can only use each of the Waymark departments once. All must be your Waymarks. All must be within a half-mile (0.8 KM) radius. For an extra challenge, limit the radius to a tenth of a mile (0.16 KM). Some of us WM in target rich environment. Any future nearby Lucky Seven Waymarks cannot reuse a Waymark (WM) used in a previous WM. This means you can only use each WM once.

 

Maybe there is a case for a group!

I know I'd like to link some of my waymarks together to make a tour.

[+MountainWoods]

And yes a Waymark referred to within a Bookmark Waymark could be another Bookmark Waymark!! Why not? The idea is that you can end up with a Folder/Folder/Folder/File relationship just like in a computer operating system's hierarchical file system. For example:

---

Waymark: MountainWoods's Bookmarks

...

Description:

MountainWoods Favorite Abandoned Cemeteries

MountainWoods Path Across Missouri

MountainWoods Recommended U.S. Sites

...

---

Waymark: MountainWoods Favorite Abandoned Cemeteries

...

Description:

Yearns Cemetery

Whittingdon Cemetery

...

---

Waymark: MountainWoods Path Across Missouri

...

Description:

Some Waymark On the East of Missouri

....

Some Waymark On the West of Missouri

---

Waymark: MountainWoods Recommended U.S. Sites

...

Description:

Neat Waymark to visit in Washington State

Neat Waymark to visit in Oregon

...

---

(In the above, I have underscored the description text to make it look like links for purposes of illustration. In reality they would be actual links, as required.)

Edited September 6, 2014 by MountainWoods

[+MountainWoods]

Sounds a bit like "Lucky 7" except the 7 have to be in different departments...

 

http://www.Waymarking.com/cat/details.aspx?f=1&guid=2a0f9fd5-bb3a-49c7-8463-176266b05b2c

 

This is a Waymark game to find at least seven Waymarks in a given radius. You can find and submit more than seven, but you can only use each of the Waymark departments once. All must be your Waymarks. All must be within a half-mile (0.8 KM) radius. For an extra challenge, limit the radius to a tenth of a mile (0.16 KM). Some of us WM in target rich environment. Any future nearby Lucky Seven Waymarks cannot reuse a Waymark (WM) used in a previous WM. This means you can only use each WM once.

 

Maybe there is a case for a group!

I know I'd like to link some of my waymarks together to make a tour.

Exactly. Lucky 7 is too limiting. And yes, making a Waymark tour would be a perfect example of a Bookmark Waymark.

[+MountainWoods]

BTW, the difference between what I am proposing and the Lucky 7 category illustrates an important point:

Folks come to Waymarking for different reasons. And often for more than one reason per person.

 

In what I'm about to say, I am not talking about an "either/or" type of thing. I easily see myself as having started Waymarking for at least the following two reasons. And there are more.

 

Gaming: The Lucky 7 category is obviously for fun and games; a bit of a challenge to accumulate Waymarks in 7 different categories, while at the same time visiting interesting things/places. It's the kind of "locationless-but-GPSr-based" game that Waymarking can easily produce.

 

Documenting: Some of us also come to Waymarking for a kind of serious side of its potential: to try to document interesting things/places in the hopes that, someday, Groundspeak will fix some of the searching issues; so that a person can perform personalized searches for meaningful things/places to visit (for them).

 

Wouldn't it be nice if a new First Responder could do a search for all Firehouses within 10 or 20 miles of their home, so they could seek them out, as well as their colleagues from these Firehouses? Or, if that doesn't tickle your interest, replace First Responder and Firehouses with something that would tickle your interest. Too bad that the site doesn't let you do that, yet. But we "documenter types" forge ahead hoping that things will get better.

 

Those are just two reasons to Waymark, and I am sure there are more. Whatever your reason(s) for Waymarking, those reasons involve visiting and/or listing interesting things/places and having fun - since that's (supposed to be) the definition of a Waymark.

 

I believe that gamers, documenters, and whatever-other-type of Waymarker, can benefit from the idea of Bookmarking related Waymarks: either for a game or for serious study, tours, you-name-it.

 

And they should not have to do that off-site! It should be right here at Waymarking.com.

Edited September 6, 2014 by MountainWoods

[+MountainWoods]

Although the intent of Bookmark Waymarks is grouping existing Waymarks, rather than being Visited in its own right, the latter is still possible, and may be a desirable feature. A couple of thoughts came to my mind concerning Visiting Requirements, which I have incorporated into the original post in this topic.

 

1. I had originally stated that there would be no Variables for a Bookmark Waymark. However, since the Description can only contain short name/link pairs, and the Waymark poster is allowed to set the Visit Requirements (beyond a minimum), then they need to have a place to record the Visit Requirements. So there would be a Variable for Visit Requirements (a text field) which would be Required. You don't want to have the situation where the Bookmark Waymark owner would leave such a field blank, and then the first Visitor that comes along fills in the Visit Requirements!!
   
2. Although there are probably not a lot of Waymarkers who do armchair visits just to pump up their visit numbers, it is sadly true that there are probably some. That being the case, the category would have to have a minimum Visit Requirement. I still like the idea of leaving as much of the Visit Requirements to the poster of the Bookmark Waymark as possible. But a category minimum requirement that the Visitor has to have visited at least one of the referenced (bookmarked) Waymarks is not unreasonable.
   

 

Time for some computer geek stuff: The reason that I like the idea of allowing the Bookmark Waymark owner to set the Visit Requirements (above a minimum) is because their Bookmark may represent an AND, an OR, or a self-imposed threshhold. For example: One bookmark may be set up to have the Visitor consider some possibilities, then visit at least one of those possibilities, at which point the Bookmark Waymark's intent was satisfied with that one visit. (An OR in computer terminology.)

 

On the other hand, another bookmark may be set up as a challenge - a game based on a single bookmark! The poster may require that all of the referenced Waymarks have to be visited before the Bookmark Waymark can be visited (an AND in computer terminology) -- thus recording that the challenge was successful; like Groundspeak's silly scavenger hunt idea, but without the randomness that kills the idea of their scavenger hunt for most of us.

 

Or the intent of the Bookmark Waymark is that you simply have fun visiting as many of the referenced Waymarks as you are able to. For example, the Bookmark may be of a bunch of recommended Waymarks to visit in an area, but the BW owner knows that the visitor may have come from a far land, and may not be able to get back to the area any time soon. The visitor may take advantage of the Bookmark and visit as many Waymarks as possible, then thank the BW poster by recording a visit to their Bookmark. "Thanks for this wonderful list! I got to see 5 of the Waymarks in this Bookmark: A, B, C, D, and E. Good recommendations." This is a self-imposed threshhold.

 

Personally, I like the idea of a Bookmark mainly for the grouping feature; with Visiting being a much less important aspect. But since it is possible to Visit a Bookmark Waymark, just like any other Waymark, I figured I better give it some thought!

[+saopaulo1]

Sounds like the waytours category.

[+MountainWoods]

Waytours is a subset of Bookmarks. You'll notice that Waytours is for short tours -- that is, there is a geographical limitation. It does not fulfil the features of a generalized Bookmark.

 

Bookmarks could be for any set of Waymarks. No geographical limitation.

 

Or in Geocaching terms, a Waytour is like a multicache, where a Bookmark would like, well, a bookmark!

[+MountainWoods]

By the way, those of us who have our own network domain and web site storage already have a means of making publicly available groupings (bookmarks) of Waymarks. I could easily do that on my site. But doing so would not benefit the overall Waymarking Community. Those who don't have the ability to make web pages ad hoc whenever they feel like it really don't have a way to make public groups of Waymarks.

 

And yet I am convinced that, not only the Waymarking community, but the general public could benefit by such public bookmarks. In fact, it would be a good way to introduce Waymarking to the general public. Just point them to a Bookmark that would contain a bunch of Waymarks that are interesting to them.

 

The Geocachers can make public bookmarks of Geocaches -- so why can't we make public bookmarks of Waymarks?

 

If you or I were to request such a feature for Waymarks from Groundspeak, it would probably not be implemented in our life times. But we can do it ourselves!

 

Again, the idea of a Bookmarks category and Waymarks is that they would not be limited by the criteria in existing categories like Lucky 7 or Waytours. The maker of the Bookmarks Waymark sets their own criteria for what is listed in the Bookmarks Waymark.

 

Continuing to invite comments on such a category.

[+Benchmark Blasterz]

Sounds like a cool category idea to us -- we are already thinking of a bookmark list for our WMs

[+MountainWoods]

It seems that one can just use an Uncategorized Waymark to do what I am thinking of. And it looks like there are Uncategorized Waymarks all the way back to 2006, so they probably do not get cleaned out periodically. I hope.

 

I would have pursued this, but I wanted to see if the category went through, if Groundspeak would modify the database queries to ignore Waymarks in the Bookmarks category for counting posted Waymarks (but not visits). I never received a response to my email asking about that, and I really doubt that Groundspeak would do something like that; though as a software architect, I realize that it would take less than 30 minutes to modify such queries. But it ain't gonna happen.

 

The main thing I wanted -- well you know what I wanted because I've already stated it: Just a URL to point folks to so that they could see a collection of Waymarks of some kind (you pick the criteria). Since an Uncategorized Waymark can do the same thing, and you don't have to be logged in to view an Uncategorized Waymark, they will serve my purpose.

 

Thanks to those who showed an interest. I will be disbanding the Groupies group and hope to rename it to use for something else.

[+MountainWoods]

Since Groups cannot be deleted, I've renamed the Groupies group and made it into a group that does not expect to make a category.

 

It is now a group called "Missouri Loves Company" and is opened to anyone who likes to Waymark in Missouri or in the counties around Missouri in other states. Who knows, we may host a Waymarking Missourah-Event or something.