Copied across from the Wales group as a few of our fine friends over the bridge might be interested. Get in touch if so. :-)
Please note - based on the 50 emails I've had so far that clearly haven't bothered to read the brief, I need to clarify we're only really interested in hearing from either:
A freelancer based in South Wales or very nearby (Bristol?).
A very small agency based in Cardiff or very nearby.
We're not interested in hearing from outsourcing companies, overseas developers, or big agencies. Sorry.
Some of you may (or may not!) be aware of a wifi map that I created a few years ago - http://wifi-in-cardiff.co.uk. That was pretty successful (18k views so far) and spawned a handful of copycat sites that I formed into a rough directory - http://www.wifi-in-uk.co.uk.
That in turn resulted in a friend of a friend (http://chrisduran.eu/) setting up http://www.wifi-in-australia.com/
We started chatting and decided a big user-generated global map could really work. A wikipedia of wifi maps, if you like.
Chris, being more technically aware than me, started to code it using Drupal. He was new to the platform but felt its modular system suited what we were trying to achieve.
But I think he's hit a bit of a brick wall (both in terms of knowledge of Drupal, and time), and we're looking to bring in a new member of the team to help us finish it off and get it launched.
We're not sure if it'll die on its arse, or go on to be a huge success where we'll all make a fortune off advertising before selling it on to Google for $18m....
;-)
But it certainly has massive potential as there's nothing else out there that really addresses the problem (all other maps seem to be auto-generated/scraped, or very local, or network specific etc). We're hoping it could be one day be more than just a wifi map, too.
Anyway, it's a fun project and hopefully doesn't need too much work to finish it off. We're looking for someone to come onboard and help us do that. We're open to suggestions in terms of cost, or it might be a project that you feel has big potential (like we do!) and would be interested in an equity stake.
I've posted the things (in rough priority order) that Chris believes really need finishing off to get it to a beta stage, but if you're genuinely interested then drop me a line on neil@dizzyjam.com and I'll give you the URL and login to have a closer look.
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Marker placement autozoom
Probably the biggie, and the one that most likely needs some coding.
We have a google map location picker for adding markers on a map.
Ideally this location picker would start off in the vicinity of the
city. Either using some sort of geocoding. For a given hotspot map,
the google map will auto-centre and auto-zoom to show all markers for
a map. So an alternative to a geocoding service, a similar autozoom,
autocentre function might be nice. -
Social media (Twitter/Facebook/Usual suspects) integration.
Some sort of announcement service that will let our twitter and
facebook pages know about new markers and/or maps. Obviously every
single marker would be excessive, but perhaps a daily/weekly summary
and stats. Perhaps a twitter status feed (twitter pull module-like)
would be nice too. -
Marker comments and ratings
A rating / comment system for markers. We have some rudimentary
comments built in to markers, but being able to show them within the
GMap bubbles would be good, and an anonymous rating system (think out
of 5 stars). -
Hotspot categorisation.
Currently, we define a map by using a two-tiered taxonomy, with
country (pre-populated) at the first tier, and the city/town/region
(user-defined) at the second tier. I wonder if there may be a more
effective way to do this using nodes, CCK, etc.. -
Map owner and description.
The description for a map is currently the description entry for the
2nd tier taxonomy term. I have also made a small module (let's call it
a modulette) that associates a new term with the user that created it. -
Logging
Probably linked to point 5, but some way of keeping track of marker
edits/adds/etc. Think wikipedia revisions. -
A new set of eyes
Neil and I have been looking at this too often, for too long. It would
be really nice to get some fresh meat involved. For example, the
layout we have now is functional, but could probably use improvement.