

Show HN: Find days out near you in the UK - robotmay
http://daysoutnear.me

======
arethuza
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.info/>

~~~
robotmay
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! :)

~~~
arethuza
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/>

~~~
robotmay
I'm using Flickr's API for getting photos at the moment (it's actually a
really good API), and I'd definitely like to give people a more visual way of
browsing the places.

------
fiznool
Awesome project. One of those things I can see will be really useful.

One suggestion: make it responsive. The design lends itself well to
mobilising: shrink the map view, put the columns into tabs, etc. This would be
an even better resource for using when you are out and about, especially as it
could use the HTML5 geolocation API to work out where you are and what is
close by.

Great work!

~~~
robotmay
I toyed with the idea of making it responsive when I first built the layout
but opted for a fixed design to save on time. It's a feature I'd really like
to get into the site soon as I've already felt the pain of navigating it on my
own phone.

Thanks for the great feedback :)

------
wgx
All places: <http://daysoutnearme.com/places> seems to return results in a
strange order - it's not alphabetical?

UI: Items with 'August' in their date make the panel break onto a newline

Items with an email could auto mailto: link the email
<http://daysoutnearme.com/events/simply-walk-2012-05-03>

Print button on item: print preview opens with the body copy overlaying the
map (print media query?)

Browsing around on the map doesn't reload pins for the area you browse to,
they stay as the /hubs/city you selected

UI: All events <http://daysoutnearme.com/events> could use a lick of paint.

Bravo! Finding it hard to fault, hence the nitpick comments above. :)

~~~
robotmay
Ah yes, I (slightly) forgot about the /places and /events pages, as they were
mostly added in for SEO purposes. They're next on my list to tidy up, however!

I need to figure out a better format for the dates, as there are a number of
possibilities that will cause it to wrap. I was thinking about truncating the
month name if it's too long.

In theory they should have maintained the links/email links from the source
copy but I think my HTML filter is a bit too strong (also note the lack of
paragraphs). It's on the to-do list :)

Print stylesheet is on its way soon!

Browsing around the map is a work in progress; at the moment it shows the
places currently shown in the list below, but I definitely want it to list
everything and pull them in as you browse.

Thanks for the feedback!

------
robotmay
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 Wales. I'm working on support for people to submit their own
events/places (which is one of the primary goals of the site).

I'd really like some more feedback and advice from people; what I've had so
far has been great but I want as much as possible to help me improve the
application and provide a great service to users. This is the first personal
project I've launched and I'd be incredibly grateful for any/all feedback.

~~~
oracuk
This is a great site, will likely be very handy for me over the summer.

Couple of things that immediately jumped out as useful additions for my
particular use case: 1) A 'family friendly' filter on places 2) A 'kids'
filter on events 3) A filter based on distance 4) Even better a filter based
on how long it takes to drive to the event or the place (maybe using Google
Maps directions estimates?)

I'm definitely going to use this over the next few weeks.

~~~
robotmay
1/2: This is something I really want to implement, as finding family days out
is one of my main goals. 3: In the works! 4: I've had this suggestion before
and I think it'd be a great feature; I'm looking into it :D

Thanks for the feedback!

------
polshaw
Very nice, great design. I've often considered this an opportunity.. although
managing the events to a high standard is a difficult challenge (perhaps
consider (carefully) some element of crowd-sourcing?).

What I would like to see, is some way to get photos related to a place/event
(some of their own websites had none). I might usually get them from google
maps (either streetview or images w/ location).. but a different approach
could work too (image search?).

Another possibility would be to add walks.

~~~
robotmay
Aye, managing the events/places is the trickiest part at the moment. One of my
main goals is to have people submitting their own events/places or submitting
those they know of near them; I can't index everything by myself,
unfortunately! I'm working on an admin panel which will allow me to moderate
submissions to help keep it clean and helpful.

In theory a lot of the places (and events too if they have past versions of
the same event) will show photos from Flickr. It matches on the Flickr place
ID and pulls in photos mentioning the name in that area. However it does mean
that a number of places have no photos, which I'd love to improve upon.
Allowing people to add their own photos might be a good improvement.

I'm trying to think of a way of including things like walks; data that is
neither a place nor an event, but something to do at a place/in an area. I'm
currently listing activities (although they don't match up to every record
yet) as general terms, but I'd like to find a way to list more specific
activities!

Thanks for the feedback, it's much appreciated :)

------
nicholassmith
Nice! Good work!

Some of your look-up details are a bit off though, if I click 'Newcastle' I
get a list of things so we'll pick 'Get Outdoors and Dirty' as it's the first,
and quite frankly who can say no to getting dirty. If you go into Newcastle it
says 7 miles, which seems about right, however if you type Middlesbrough into
the search box it'll also list it but it's about 20 miles off (38 miles vs
about 59ish in real life).

~~~
robotmay
Thanks for the feedback!

The geocoding can be a little odd at times and I'm keeping track of things
like this to help me improve it. The first thing I'll do is ensure that all
the city/area links on the homepage point to more or less the center of that
city/area; some seem to be in very odd places. Any reports like this are
really useful :D

------
philjones88
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.

~~~
robotmay
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!

------
andrewaylett
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 :).

~~~
robotmay
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!

------
jgrahamc
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.

~~~
robotmay
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

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

~~~
robotmay
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.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Unfortunately not. There's a load of info about it here though:
<http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1036> \- Might be in
there somewhere

~~~
robotmay
Looks like it's the same setup as Cardiff Castle; most likely run by the local
council. These kinda one-off places are what will hopefully be easily added
when I open up event/place submission to users; which I'm hoping to get up in
the next week or so :)

------
Produce
The green background is too dark to have black text on it, not enough
contrast. Either make the background lighter or darker with white text.

~~~
robotmay
Thanks for the response! I've mentioned in another comment that the green
seems to vary wildly on different displays, so I'm looking into improvements I
can make there.

------
jasiek
Useful, I'd definitely use it. Can you change the background color to
something less gloomy? :)

~~~
robotmay
It seems to vary wildly depending on monitors; on my Mac it's bright grass-
green, on my desktop it seems to be more of a muted snot. It's on my list of
things to fix!

------
withakay
Handy site, I have noticed the pagination doesn't seem to work though :(

~~~
robotmay
Does it not work anywhere or in one specific area? I'll take a look into it
straight away :)

