Saturday, October 25, 2014

A communal coffeeneuring map

Updates for 2017: 

We are ready have you add your stops.  Old stops are in blue, new ones are in green.  If you find your shop is already there then just add you link as an additional coffeeneur.

Updates for 2015:

The Communal Coffeeneuring map is back.  If you added your stops in 2014 then you still have permission to edit the map this year.  If you didn't edit the map in the past then please send your gmail address to me at newenglandbicyclist @ gmail.com and I'll give you permission.  Expect and email from somervillecyclist@gmail.com (the account where I own the map).  You will need to login with a Gmail account to edit the map. The map is intended to track coffee stops on the current year's Coffeeneuring challenge so please include only coffee shops that you visiting in the current Coffeeneuring season.  Also, please add the year you visited.  We didn't do this last year so I'll figure out a way to add the year in for those entries.  Years will be nice to have, if this map continues to be a part of coffeeneuring.

One more change - 2015 visits are large red points, the rest are small purple dots.

Please check this page for how to deal with duplicate entries - sometimes we visit the same shop that another coffeeneur already stopped at.  It also tells you how to show only your coffee shop visits on the map and add that map to your blog.

Last year I helped the Chief Coffeeneur supplement her classic colored pencil map of coffeeneuring with a digital version of the map.   One person commented, suggesting that we should map all of the coffeeshops that people visit on the coffeeneuring challenge.  That would have been a lot of work last year and even more coffeeneurs are riding this year so having me or Mary add everyone's destinations would be more work than we are capable of doing.  But the idea is a good one and I made a map of my destinations and then I thought that I could share editing privileges for this map and anyone who is coffeeneuring could contribute.  This still could get unwieldly, with me having to send an email to anyone who expresses interest but I think it's worth a try and Mary thinks it could be worthwhile.  So here is the map, with the three coffee shops that I visited on it (and maybe more by the time you read this) and ready for more coffee shops:



If you are adding your coffee shop(s) and they don't appear on the map, go back to the table and open the Map of Location view.  This will geocode your address(es) and they will then appear in this map.

So this is how it will work ...

Anyone interested in adding their stops to the map should email me directly.  Find my email address in the About Me section of the right column of this blog.  Please send me your Gmail account, which seems to be the easiest to work with.  I will give you editing privileges via email.

Notice that you will have editing privileges, which means you can add rows of data but also accidentally delete or otherwise edit another person's data.  So you you will have to be careful.  This is what the table looks like so far:


If you want to add a coffeeneuring stop, you go to the Rows view (note the tab for Row, Cards, and Map of Location) and then in the Edit menu, select Add Row.  You might select Delete Row by accident, which will delete all of the rows and end this experiment.  The Add Row interface looks like this:


You need to fill in the coffee shop name (Shop), which is a simple text field.

Next, add the address (Address).  The address could be something like "1720 Massachusetts Avenue, Lexington, MA 02420" (the Ride Studio Cafe address), or it could be "Concord, MA", which would be less precise.  It's best to check the address in Google Maps.  For instance, something like "Starbucks in Lexington, MA" yields the less helpful (in this instance) map of all of the nearby Starbucks.  "Ride Studio Cafe Lexington, MA" works since there is only one Ride Studio Cafe in or near Lexington, MA.  An address could be a latitude, longitude pair, like "33.023513, -113.049178", works.  Try this one in Google Maps.  I've had lunch at this place, but didn't get there by bike.  If you think you don't have access to where you visited in spherical coordinates, simply open Google Earth and zoom to where you had coffee and look at the bottom of the Google Earth window.  Google Maps likes Decimal Degrees and not Degrees Minutes Seconds, which is the Google Earth default.  Change this in the Tools menu under Options.  In the Options window, look for Show Lat/Long then click on the Decimal Degrees radio box.

Now add a link to the coffee shops website (Link).  This is a hyperlink, if that term is still used, which take the map reader to the website and will hopefully help other coffeeneurs figure out if they want to visit the shop as well.

You can add notes about the coffee shop, or your visit in the Notes field.

The last field, Coffeeneur, is meant to identify you, the person entering the data.  And by identifying you, I mean your online presence, if you have one.  For instance, I put in a link to my Twitter page or a blog post about my coffeeneuring trip.  You could have put in a link to your blog, or Instagram account, or a link to your blog post about my visit there.  Anything works but it should be a legitimate web address or leave it blank and leave your first name in the Notes field.  Once you added a row and saved it (see the above image) then you need to click on the Map of Locations tab.  This geocodes the address, making it possible to put a pushpin on the map representing the shop and the data about it that you added.  Doing this may change the map extent.  While it is presently centered around Lexington, MA, adding a point in Finland, where there is an active coffeeneur, will center the map over the Atlantic and scale it so that both the eastern United States and Europe are in the map.

So be brave and contact me and I'll give you permission to edit the map and soon you will be adding to the map on this page.  A word of warning: I work a full time job during regular-ish business hours and have two children.  That means it might take a day or two after you send me an email to invite you as an editor.  If I seemed to forget, don't worry about pinging me.

I'll stop accepting requests to edit this page not long after Mary's final posts about this season's coffeeneuring exploits.


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