1. FixMyStreet’s been redesigned

    FixMyStreet, our site for reporting things like potholes and broken street lights, has had something of a major redesign, kindly supported in part by Kasabi. With the help of Supercool, we have overhauled the look of the site, bringing it up to date and making the most of some lovely maps. And as with any mySociety project, we’d really appreciate your feedback on how we can make it ever more usable.

    The biggest change to the new FixMyStreet is the use of responsive design, where the web site adapts to fit within the environment in which it’s being viewed. The main difference on FixMyStreet, besides the obvious navigation changes, is that in a small screen environment, the reporting process changes to have a full screen map and confirmation step, which we thought would be preferable on small touchscreens and other mobiles. There are some technical details at the end of this post.

    Along with the design, we’ve made a number of other improvements along the way. For example, something that’s been requested for a long time, we now auto-rotate photos on upload, if we can, and we’re storing whatever is provided rather than only a shrunken version. It’s interesting that most photos include correct orientation information, but some clearly do not (e.g. the Blackberry 9800).

    We have many things we’d still like to do, as a couple of items from our github repository show. Firstly, it would be good if the FixMyStreet alert page could have something similar to what we’ve done on Barnet’s planning alerts service, providing a configurable circle for the potential alert area. We also are going to be adding faceted search to the area pages, allowing you to see only reports in a particular category, or within a certain time period.

    Regarding native phone apps – whilst the new design does hopefully work well on mobile phones, we understand that native apps are still useful for a number of reasons (not least, the fact photo upload is still not possible from a mobile web app on an iPhone). We have not had the time to update our apps, but will be doing so in the near future to bring them more in line with the redesign and hopefully improve them generally as well.

    The redesign is not the only news about FixMyStreet today

    As part of our new DIY mySociety project, we are today publishing an easy-to-read guide for people interested in using the FixMyStreet software to run versions of FixMyStreet outside of Britain. We are calling the newly upgraded, more re-usable open source code the FixMyStreet Platform.

    This is the first milestone in a major effort to upgrade the FixMyStreet Platform code to make it easier and more flexible to run in other countries. This effort started last year, and today we are formally encouraging people to join our new mailing list at the new FixMyStreet Platform homepage.

    Coming soon: a major upgrade to FixMyStreet for Councils

    As part of our redesign work, we’ve spoken to a load of different councils about what they might want or need, too. We’re now taking that knowledge, combining it with this redesign, and preparing to relaunch a substantially upgraded FixMyStreet for Councils product. If you’re interested in that, drop us a line.

    Kasabi: Our Data is now in the Datastore

    Finally, we are also now pushing details of reports entered on FixMyStreet to Kasabi’s data store as open linked data; you can find details of this dataset on their site. Let us know if it’s useful to you, or if we can do anything differently to help you.

    Technical details

    For the web developers amongst you – we have a base stylesheet for everyone, and another stylesheet that is only included if your browser width is 48em or above (an em is a unit of measurement dependent on your font size), or if you’re running Internet Explorer 6-8 (as they don’t handle the modern CSS to do this properly, we assume they’ll want the larger styles) using a conditional comment. This second stylesheet has slight differences up to 61em and above 61em. Whilst everything should continue to work without JavaScript, as FixMyStreet has done with its map-based reporting since 2007, where it is enabled this allows us to provide the full screen map you can see at large screen sizes, and the adjusted process you see at smaller resolutions.

    We originally used Modernizr.mq() in our JavaScript, but found that due to the way this works (adding content to the end of the document), this can cause issues with e.g. data() set on other elements, so we switched to detecting which CSS is being applied at the time.

    On a mobile, you can see that the site navigation is at the end of the document, with a skip to navigation link at the top. On a desktop browser, you’ll note that visually the navigation is now at the top. In both cases, the HTML is the same, with the navigation placed after the main content, so that it hopefully loads and appears first. We are using display: table-caption and caption-side: top in the desktop stylesheet in order to rearrange the content visually (as explained by Jeremy Keith), a simple yet powerful technique.

    From a performance point of view, on the front page of the site, we’re e.g. using yepnope (you can get it separately or as part of Modernizr) so that the map JavaScript is downloading in the background whilst you’re there, meaning the subsequent map page is hopefully quicker to load. I’m also adding a second tile server today – not because our current one isn’t coping, it is, but just in case something should happen to our main one – we already have redundancy in our postcode/area server MapIt and our population density service Gaze.

    If you have any technical questions about the design, please do ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

  2. More on customary proximity

    And a follow-up to my last post: the population density and customary proximity APIs are now available in Gaze. The additional APIs are:

    get_population_density
    Parameters:

    lat
    WGS84 latitude, in decimal degrees
    lon
    WGS84 longitude, in decimal degrees

    Return an estimate of the population density at (lat, lon), in persons per square kilometer, as a decimal number followed by a line feed.

    get_radius_containing_population
    Parameters:

    lat
    WGS84 latitude, in decimal degrees
    lon
    WGS84 longitude, in decimal degrees
    number
    number of persons
    maximum
    largest radius returned, in kilometers; optional; default 150

    Return an estimate of the smallest radius around (lat, lon) containing at least number persons, or maximum, if that value is smaller, as a decimal number followed by a line feed.

    For instance,

    Enjoy! Questions and comments to chris@mysociety.org, please.

  3. Gaze web service

    A very quick post to announce the launch of a public interface to our Gaze web gazetteer service. The motivation behind Gaze is collecting location information from users without using maps (a clunky approach with poor accessibility and licensing problems) or postcodes (which do not have universal coverage and have privacy issues as well as licensing problems). Instead the idea is to use place names to identify locations, even in the presence of ambiguity, alternate names, etc. We do this by providing a search service over a large gazetteer (2.2 million places and 3 million names), and supplying additional contextual information to disambiguate common place names. The API is very simple, with one major function and two other supporting ones.

    Anyway, without further ado, here is the API. Internally we use one based on RABX, but we’ve done a special “RESTful” API for everyone else. All requests should be HTTP GETs; all parameters must be in UTF-8; and all responses are in UTF-8 plain text or comma-separated values. All calls should be passed to the URL,

    http://gaze.mysociety.org/gaze-rest

    selecting a particular function by specifying the HTTP parameter f, for instance

    http://gaze.mysociety.org/gaze-rest?f=get_find_places_countries

    Available functions are:

    get_country_from_ip
    Parameters:

    ip
    IPv4 address of a host, in dotted-quad format

    Guess the country of location of a host from its IP address. The result of this call will be an ISO country code, followed by a line feed; or, if it was not possible to determine a country, a line feed on its own.

    get_find_places_countries
    No parameters.Return the list of countries for which the find_places call has a gazetteer available. The list is returned as a list of ISO country codes followed by line feeds.

    find_places
    Parameters:

    country
    ISO country code of country in which to search for places
    state
    state in which to search for places; presently this is only meaningful for country=US (United States), in which case it should be a conventional two-letter state code (AZ, CA, NY etc.); optional
    query
    query term input by the user; must be at least two characters long
    maxresults
    largest number of results to return, from 1 to 100 inclusive; optional; default 10
    minscore
    minimum match score of returned results, from 1 to 100 inclusive; optional; default 0

    Returns in CSV format (as defined by this internet draft) with a one-line header a list of the following fields:

    name
    name of the place described by this row
    in-qualifier
    blank, or the name of an administrative region in which this place lies (for instance, a county)
    near-qualifier
    blank, or a list of nearby places, separated by commas
    latitude
    WGS-84 latitude of place in decimal degrees, north-positive
    longitude
    WGS-84 longitude of place in decimal degrees, east-positive
    state
    blank, or containing state code for US
    score
    match score for this place, from 0 to 100 inclusive

    Enjoy! Questions and comments to hello@mysociety.org, please.

    Update: we’ve now added the facilities for discovering population densities and “customary proximity” (as discussed in this post) to Gaze. The additional APIs are documented here.