I’ve been thinking about picking up this project since thunderblaster seems to have gone AWOL and the map no longer works. I’ve got the basis for it set out on a local machine here, but I wanted to gauge what everyone thought of hosting this data on a free tier AWS cloud server to (hopefully) future-proof it a little more.
I had that idea originally when I decided I wanted to explore taking the reins on this, but I realized over the past week or so of offhandedly working on it that people might not be too ecstatic about their info living on some random Amazon server. Wanted to put feelers out and see what the consensus was before moving forward in that direction if the majority of people turn out to be uncomfortable with that idea.
I’m personally fine with this, I highly doubt anyone nowadays doesn’t have their information on an Amazon server already. My only suggestion would be just don’t include direct addresses, maybe just a line of contact if it’s a single person we are talking about. When it comes to piercing shops though, It’d probably be fine to have their address.
Great Idea, and cool of you to offer @Ottomagne
I concur with @Zectogonix
and would add, individuals could just choose a “neutral” location they would be happy to meet up, or just down to a generic suburb / town level etc.
of course, if people have other suitable hosting suggestions (eg. DT server?) they can put out a reply, but at the end of the day we want the most amount of “buy in” from the community, so maybe after there has been some further input you (or I if you would like) could set up a Poll for hosting location preference
If we throw out a @thunderblaster , it might also get his attention and he may be able to give you ( @Ottomagne ) a handover and access to the data…
I like the idea of putting usernames that people can PM on the forum to sort of protect contact details unless they are a partner studio, and a location of choice - professionals can use their studio location, cyborgs can use city, and people with a PM3 and willing to assist with things can list their favourite bar (where you can buy them a drink for their troubles!)
I’m glad to hear most are flexible about it. I had the same thought process initially (that most people probably have various amounts of data living on Amazon servers already), but I ultimately want to be as respectful as possible to the community at large, and didn’t want to assume that just because it might exist already that people would be okay with it being explicitly out there. I like the idea of polling for alternatives, but to be honest, I’m not actually familiar with any. The inspiration for this project came just as much from learning a couple AWS things while somewhat future proofing the resulting host space (in case I disappear off the face of the Earth for some reason) as much as it is creating a map to help everyone find people near them (my day-to-day work is more geared toward locally hosted full-stack development, so I’ve pretty much got no experience with cloud computing). On top of that, I had heard from a friend of mine who is certified in AWS that their free tier was pretty robust, so I thought it might be a good opportunity to put something out there with little-to-no financial investment (assuming this doesn’t blow up in popularity sometime soon, I think the only think that would need to be paid for in the short term would be a domain name for the actual hosting).
I’ve been working on being able to dynamically pull the info of the current partners from dangerousthings.com directly so that I could use that info in the database as a starting off point. Figure that’s as good a place to start as any. I got some code put in that I think is fairly robust, and populates the database in a way that I like. Apologies to @amal if you noticed a sudden uptick in get requests for the partners.xml - the majority of my testing was done with a local copy of the file on my home computer, but converting it to an AWS Lambda function and then getting the database schema in a state that I like it took more requesting than I thought it would
Next step is serving this info in a GeoJSON format when queried through a REST API. After that, it should be as simple as having a webpage query that API, then use that data to build the map. I’m gonna try to emulate the map that @thunderblaster made using Leaflet and JS, and hopefully build in the Passport.js support with the Vivokey plugin he made already after that. I feel like once I can get it up to that point, then I can start to worry about the other extra features suggested. I really like the idea of having a review/star system set up for piercers/body mod artists, so that’d probably be something I’d want to explore first post-prototype… Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to work
Exactly! That is one of the issues; As in, who would update it? big job for one person. ie. Amal. Expecting the piercers to keep their info up to date, is probably unrealistic, hence the “need” for the community map.
Thanks again for picking up the reins on this for us all.
Do the piercers and bodymodders have to enlist personally? Because mine said he’s really fine with me spreading the word about his work (he’s just not active on this forum and such…), so if that’s okay for you, maybe you can add him to the list?
Did so, thank you!
Stupid question - I don’t see any markers on the map, do I have to log in (that would be a little difficult, since I’ve got no VivoKey…^^) or what may cause that?
The map that’s linked up top is still the old one that thunderblaster was hosting, and there’s been some sort of data disconnect on his end that’s causing the map to not work properly (which is why I wanted to migrate it to a cloud server). I haven’t got the first pass of the map set up yet, but I’m pretty close!
Alright y’all, first pass of the map is up currently on my Github. Currently, it’s just a carbon copy of the info that is hosted by DangerousThings, so there’s not much use in visiting it, but I’ll be posting updates as I continue to work on it.
I have the cloud architecture set up, for the most part, and an API endpoint that returns the database info when it’s hit, so the immediate next step is downloading that data when the webpage hits and using that to populate the markers on the map (instead of having a copy of the data in the repo itself to build the site off of). After that, it’ll be setting up a way for the community to add members to the database, and then we’ll really have a decent starting point.
My goal / wish is for a final map that utilizes the SSO features of Discourse (this forum) to allow members to manage their own map coords and information. If that can be accomplished then I’d gladly make it the official DT map. How do we go about that?
This is a great idea. Let me check out the Discourse API docs and see if I can’t figure a way to integrate that through that. If not, we get a little hacky
This might not work out, but will there ever be something like a flag for help?
I am not great with computers and programimg, so the PM3 is a foreign language to me.
Would it ever be possible, for there to be an option for physical help? I am not referring to install help, but programming help.
Basically. I can place my marker down in my town, showing I am an enthusiasts who would stab you with your own needle, for nothing in return.
I would also be able to place a marker down as a call for help. So if anyone sees it, they can see that I need help to look at my NExT with a pm3 or something. That way, if they are driving through, gonna be in town or whatever, if they decide to help, they would know someone in my city needs help. It would be a passive assist, as I am not willing to go to another state for it.
Another example could be if someone thinks they bricked their chip, they can put in a flag.
