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Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

daysoutnear.me

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Re: Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

#11

Post by robotmay »

andrewaylett wrote: post #8

You might want to filter your gazetteer search results better: searching for "Ipswich" gave me a town in Australia, and searching for "Norwich" gave me a town in the US... To reproduce, click the "Ipswich" link on the homepage, then put your cursor in the location box at the top-right and hit enter. Nice for the places that have data, though :).

Gah, I thought I'd fixed all those odd locations. I'm using Nomanatim for geocoding, which seems to pick up a lot of the 'new world' locations rather than the originals - I'll go through them all again later and fix the wrong ones!

Re: Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

#12

Post by robotmay »

maxjaderberg wrote: post #7
robotmay wrote: post #2

Now with much more data! I submitted my hobby project Days Out Near Me a few weeks back. I've tried to take on a lot of the great feedback I've had and I've made a number of big improvements to how it works. The site's goal is to aggregate a lot of events & venues for days out into one searchable database. It now grabs data from National Trust, English Heritage, The Forestry Commission, Cadw, and National Museum Wale…

just a design point - i find the black on dark green background quite uncomfortably hard to read on my screen!

You should have seen the inverse ;)

I'm constantly playing with the design and I've also found it can be a bit bright; I'll be looking to refine it soon.

Re: Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

#14

Post by robotmay »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #13

I stuck "Nottingham" in the "Location" field, and "Castle" in the "Keywords" field. It didn't mention the castle in the middle of Nottingham :(

Do you know which organisation runs it? I have a feeling that I'm missing a number of English Heritage properties, which I'm working on.

Re: Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

#16

Post by arethuza »

robotmay wrote: post #10
arethuza wrote: post #5

Can I suggest adding data from Historic Scotland - I'm sitting looking out my office window at a huge castle sitting on an old volcano and it's not on your list: http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/ Also, might be worth adding the five Scottish ski centers to your list of things to do - they generally need all the help they can get regarding publicity. The Winterhighland site is excellent: http://www.winterhighland.i…

Historic Scotland is the next source I'll be pulling in; I was up in Stirling last year and there's some seriously nice castles up there to visit. Ski centres are something I hadn't considered but would fit very well with the idea of the site. Thanks for the suggestions! :)

Actually, now I think of it, what I would really like is a site a bit like Geograph but for "places of interest" rather than just for photos.

NB Geograph is awesome: http://www.geograph.org.uk/

Re: Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

#18

Post by robotmay »

philjones88 wrote: post #6

Really good, I'd suggest pulling data from here for Bristol: http://visitbristol.co.uk/things-to-do Particularly page: http://visitbristol.co.uk/things-to-do/attractions Has the things like the zoo, aquarium, ss great britian and so on.

I always forget how much there is in Bristol; this (and any other city tourist sites people recommend) will go in my queue to pull data from!

Re: Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK

#20

Post by robotmay »

jgrahamc wrote: post #15

You might like to pull data from Nerdy Day Trips: http://www.nerdydaytrips.com/ as well. Also, if you'd like lat/long information for all the UK places in my book, The Geek Atlas, I'd be happy to supply.

Ooh, I've not seen Nerdy Day Trips before; I'll have to get in touch and see if they have an API (probably a better chance than the others I've been working on).

Location data like that would be very useful (and I'd be very grateful for it), as it would help resolve a number of issues with geocoding some of these places. There's probably a castle or two that are registered as being in a terraced street, for example :D

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