Opening Times Blog

New site launched!

2012-09-25T04:53:00.000+01:00

I've finally made the new version of opening-times.co.uk live. I've been slowly working on it in my spare time for nearly two years. I'm sure there are some bugs to iron out but I'm glad to have finally made it live.

The old site had been collecting spam, so as I've imported the pages to the new site I've tried to filter it out where possible. I'm waiting to enable editing on the new site until I can find a better way to stop spam from getting added in the first place. If you have suggestions, let me know!

I've also built a way to import from a Google spreadsheet, and hope this might be attractive to people looking to contribute to the site. I'm very grateful for all the contributions that have been made over the years, thank you. I'd like to hear feedback about how I can improve the site for you. I'm aware that some of the data is quite out of date and am looking forward to spending some time focusing on data quality now that the new site is live.

I'm also looking at releasing a public API as I have received quite a lot of emails about this. Thank you for the interest and I'll post again here shortly with the progress.

Christmas opening times

2009-12-24T14:47:00.002Z

Unfortunately, I didn't have time this year to scrape and parse all the Christmas and New Year opening times. However I've been working on a few improvements such as faster search and fixing a few bugs here and there. I've also moved to a bigger server. I'm planning to work to add special opening back in time for easter 2010, so I'll let you know when it's working.

Have a good Christmas and New Year - Julian

Wordpress plugin

2009-12-20T11:40:00.003Z

Philip John has created a Wordpress plugin for Opening Times information. Unfortunately my site seems to be having some problems serving it up at the moment, so it's a bit flaky. I haven't optimised for API calls yet, and am having problems geocoding at a fast enough rate, so I'll have a look at that in the new year.

http://philipjohn.co.uk/new-hyperlocal-wordpress-plugin-openingtimes-co-uk/

Moved server and some updates

2009-12-06T23:48:00.002Z

I've just changed the DNS to point to a new server with Memset. I'm waiting for the changes to propagate across the internet, so hopefully it will work ok.

The new server is running a newer release of the code and there are a few changes, these are the major ones which stick in my mind:

the login information should show the correct information on all pages, previously there was a problem when viewing some of the pages which used caching
I've added a link to the reports section in the footer, this should help identify information which is obviously incorrect or has been vandalised. Let me know if there are any reports you would like added or changed.
I've added a data export in a number of different formats
You no longer need to be logged in to edit or create a business. There have been quite a large number of people who register an account but then don't make any changes, so I've removed that step, hopefully this will increase participation. There is however a captcha to solve if you aren't logged, which will also reappear if you make a lot of changes in a short period. I've noticed there are a couple of people who are making excellent contributions, so please let me know me if this is annoying so I can tune it effectively. Thanks

I'll post again soon to talk about Christmas and New Year opening times, which is clearly a big issue for this site. A big thanks to all the users who have made changes.

Unlocking our geo data

2009-11-18T17:39:00.004Z

Today The Guardian reported that Ordnance Survey is preparing to release UK geo data and mapping under a free license. This will hopefully be great news for Opening Times. My site relies heavily on acquiring highly accurate geo data and also the use of maps. Currently I use Google maps and I am very happy with their service. However when a user adds a new business they are encouraged to drag the pointer to be exactly over the entrance to the store. I want the point which is picked to be free of any restrictions so that I can distribute the data and use other mapping providers if I choose. Hopefully the move by OS will simplify the copyright restrictions around geo data and allow developers like myself to get on with building great applications without worrying about tedious legal issues.

I will update when it becomes clear exactly what data is being released and what plans this site will have for the data.

Hello from BarCamp London 7

2009-10-25T07:37:00.004Z

I'm currently at BarCamp London 7, I'm very tired as I didn't get much sleep last night what with playing Werewolf and Urban Terror. People always say I should blog more, so here it is, hopefully I accidentally type something interesting.

I saw a load of interesting talks yesterday. Simon Willison's talk about non-relational databases was particularly good, I've seen a few people talking about circumstances where they make more sense that a standard relational database. It's something which I plan to test out for Opening Times at some point, as I'm a producing an XML version of every revision anyway, I might as well store it in a sensible manner and see what else it could produce.

There was also a good talk on how to build a (developer) community, which is of great importance to me at the moment. Currently I have 30 registered users which is great, so I need suggestions as to how to build the community, both of developers and data contributors. Open Street Map is an amazing inspiration in this case and I'd like to try and work as closely as possible with them as the site progresses.

The new version of the site seems to be running well, there have been a few minor problems, most of which have been ironed out, leaving only the more fundamental ones to deal with later. I received my first user submitted bug report last night, which I was really pleased about, as using a bug tracker will hopefully improve my coding process.

Ps. Happy British Summer Time wishes.

It's live

2009-10-12T13:33:00.003+01:00

After many weeks thinking about making the new site live I finally bit the bullet last night and switched over the DNS. So far things seem to be ok, I'll mainly be looking for errors at the moment, but if everything is working ok then I can start to add more data. Let me know if you have any thoughts about the new site.

Progress report on new site

2009-09-02T23:40:00.003+01:00

Wow, can't believe it's a month since my last blog post. It's certainly been a busy month. I've been working hard fixing bugs in the new beta version and scraping more data. I've got almost four times more data than the current site queued up ready to go in to the beta site soon. I'm currently working on some reports which should help detect obviously incorrect information (such as very long openings on Sundays where AM/PM has got mixed up).

Thanks to all the people who have added information so far, please leave comments on this post if you have any thoughts.

Editable opening times

2009-08-02T15:44:00.005+01:00

I've made a new version of Opening Times available at http://beta.opening-times.co.uk. This new version allows users to register and then add and edit the opening times directly. I'm hoping to build a community of editors to help gather and correct the opening times information. Please register and let me know what you think or if you find any bugs. I've also made the project open source under the AGPL, so if you fancy helping out please get in touch.

Easter versus Christmas

2009-04-13T22:08:00.002+01:00

Easter traffic was very good on Opening Times, the busiest day record was smashed to reach 53k visits, (previous best was New Year's Day 35k visits). There were some intermittent problems with the search not working, I think this is due to a time-out issue with Yahoo geocoding.

I noticed on Google trends that overall searches for "opening times" over the Easter period in the UK were greatly up on last year, where as Christmas and New Year was quite static. I wonder whether over the long term this website will significantly increase the number of searches for opening time information, I would suspect so, but impossible to have control case to test against.

I'm still working on the editable form, it is getting there and most of the remaining work is around user accounts. I am also looking at using some form of "cloud" hosting as allowing writes to the database will increase server load, also as the load has infrequent high demand periods (like Easter :) it might in the future make sense to dynamically increase the server capacity for 72 hours or so.

I am considering making this project open source under the Affero General Public License. I imagine this might make it harder to market commercially, but business isn't really my thing and I would rather see it become successful than waste my time trying to make money. Does anyone have any experience or advice on this idea?

SVG animated clock

2009-02-15T22:25:00.009Z

Update 2009-10-23 I went with a flash version for the live site, but will keep my eye on open solutions, such as canvas which looks great

Edit: Still having server problems, now using the staging server.

Since I created the new logo I had an urge to animate the clock, also I've had feedback from a few people who said they expected it to be telling the correct time. So this evening I had some spare time and created this, based on the example at BurningBird. I've tested it on Firefox on Ubuntu, and in Opera (letters around dial were missing, will investigate). I'm using the object tag, so that I could fall back to a static version. Let me know your thoughts.

Sorry, your browser doesn't understand the object tag

Ps. I found SVG really nice to work with. I created the original logo in Inkscape, but I wrote this by hand and it wasn't really that tricky, indeed once you understand the syntax I found it really powerful and preferred to other methods I've tried.

Opening past midnight

2009-02-13T14:39:00.003Z

I received an email saying that it is confusing when a store is open past midnight. I've been trying to think of a way to make this clearer. Here is a prototype, please let me know your thoughts, does it help or make it more confusing? Perhaps there is an alternative layout you think would be better. Thanks.

Update on progress

2009-02-10T08:17:00.002Z

A comment on this blog this morning from my friend Phil Wilson, reminded me that I haven't posted for ages. A quick catch up. Opening Times was crazily busy over Christmas and New Year, it even briefly peaked within the top 40,000 ranked sites on Alexa, although I suspect a lot of this was to do with other sites not being particularly busy. The server stayed up fairly well through the whole process and gave me some good insight as to how things will need to scale in the future.

In terms of adding more data I've been leaving that for a while and instead concentrating on how to keep data up to date and increase accuracy. To achieve this I've been working on a form with a history and rollback function similar to Wikipedia. This is taking a while, but hopefully I've have some ready to use in early March.

What to do when a Creative Commons license changes?

2008-12-21T21:45:00.005Z

I was thinking so much about the technical aspects I forgot to mention in my last post that I've changed the design.

I had been using a cropped version of the excellent photo of the clock at the Musée d'Orsay by Yves Lorson pretty much since the site launched back in May 2008. However a while ago Yves changed the license for the photo from a Creative Commons Attribution License to "all rights reserved". I looked in to the matter, and the license which was in place when I made the cropped would continue to apply, but I didn't feel comfortable continuing this situation especially as it wasn't so clear as to how it would affect me using the photo in different ways in the future. I tried to contact Yves, but got no reply. So I've made a new logo using Inkscape, an open source SVG editor.

Let me know what you think of the new logo, or any design ideas.

New release now live

2008-12-21T21:38:00.003Z

The new release which went wrong last week has been fixed and is now live and seems to be working ok. There were some teething problems yesterday and today where it wouldn't show whether a service was open or closed correct, but I think I've successfully fixed this as well, although it might be minute out or at change over times.

Technically this quite a bit improvement as the way that openings are stored and the calculation for determining whether they are open has been greatly improved. I've been working on this for about two months, so I'm glad it's finally live.

At the moment only Waitrose have any special openings for the Christmas and New Year period. Hopefully I shall add some more in the next few days.

In the New Year I will continue my work on form to allow users to submit and edit the information in a wiki style. Please let me know if you spot any errors on the site, thanks.

Downtime

2008-12-14T12:31:00.001Z

Sorry to anyone who was trying to access Opening Times this morning. I released a new version last night and it seemed to be working ok, but this morning it keep failing. It took a while to get the back up restored.

Reviewed on Killer Startups

2008-09-02T11:47:00.002+01:00

Opening Times got reviewed on KillerStartups, quite positive. I've thought a bit about "going global" in the past, it's quite a challenge, so far I've only really thought about translating to Welsh. There must be many more issues such as public holidays.

Fire Eagle and group search

2008-08-14T23:06:00.003+01:00

I've fixed Yahoo! Fire Eagle, so that should be available again. I've also added group search so you can filter your results by group, also some extra options in the advanced search, although not all of them are working quite correctly at the moment.

Edit - Forgot to mention I got reviewed on Google Maps Mania - yay!

Update

2008-08-01T23:33:00.005+01:00

I've added a few more services including Sainsbury's local, Booths and Fresh & Wild. I'm aware there are some issues with a small number of missing services or incorrect opening hours. I have some reports to highlight these issues and will try and take it up directly with the stores as often it is also incorrect on their website too.

Traffic has grown considerably over the past month, it will be interesting to see how quickly Google picks up these latest changes.

I'm working towards an XML schema so that I can more easily import and update the services. More details will follow on this, but let me know if you might be interested in producing XML for Opening Times.

Postfix and Google Apps on Slicehost

2008-06-29T12:07:00.003+01:00

Spent ages last night trying to get the Exception Notifier plugin and had all sorts of problems as I used Gmail from Google Apps to handle email. In the end I installed sendmail instead and everything worked fine straight off. Any reasons why this isn't recommended as standard practice? Let me know if you have any thoughts.

Mashed

2008-06-27T10:20:00.002+01:00

It's been a busy week or so for me. I met briefly with Tom Taylor who runs www.iamnear.net, it was very interesting and we talked about sharing data. I'm hoping to work on an API sometime soon.

At the weekend I went to Mashed at Alexandra Palace. I went to Hack Day last year and it was even better this year. I spent most of the time integrating Opening Times with Yahoo FireEagle, it was good to have the developers to hand to chat to about how FireEagle worked. I also worked on adding versioning to the editing of Opening Times. Hopefully once this is working I can open it up for anyone to add and edit information.

I met James Wheare who runs www.livebus.org and we are looking at providing some sort of joined up information.

New release

2008-06-20T09:52:00.003+01:00

Finally got the release out last night. The main new feature is groups, I also added information for Netto and Farmfoods. I had a company email their opening times in word format which was nice, so I'll put those in soon. I've noticed that I am missing some Sainsbury's stores, so I'll need to have a look at the urls I'm downloading.

Preparing for Christmas

2008-06-11T11:25:00.002+01:00

Google Trends was updated recently, and I had a quick look for the search terms "opening times" and "opening hours". It's something I should have done ages ago, and luckily for me it appears "opening times" is slightly more popular that "opening hours". However the main point is that people really want to find when things are open over the Christmas and New Year holidays, so that gives me six months to come up with a good solution, implement it, get people to start using it and publicise it. Still good to have a clear objective.

Ssssshh, we can't tell when we're open

2008-06-06T16:40:00.003+01:00

I'm currently emailing various stores asking for lists of their opening times where this information isn't presented on the website. So far this is the best response.

As all [name store removed] stores are Independently owned I am unable to provide due to the data protection act.

On a related note, I've submitted a Freedom of Information request through WhatDoTheyKnow, to the Post Office asking for a list of the locations and opening times of their branches. So far they have refused, saying the information is already available through their branch finder service, however I'm disputing this as compiling the results would be very tricky.

Bank Holiday thoughts

2008-05-27T14:13:00.002+01:00

There was quite a surge of people looking for opening times over the bank holiday, as you might well expect. Unfortunately Opening Times doesn't deal well with this at the moment. I've done a few experiments and should be working on this shortly. The plan is to override any standard opening times for a given day. I considered have a bank holiday standard opening time, and just displaying that when appropriate, but I know that even big chain stores vary their openings quite often so I thought it best to enter them each time.

On the technical side on Saturday I rebuilt the server with Ubuntu Hardy Heron and this time compiled Nginx from source. I also switched to use Thin as the ruby web server. Apologies for any downtime suffered during this upgrade, hopefully this should keep things smooth for a while now.

I went to Hack Day last year and it was good fun and I met loads of very clever and interesting people. I've signed up for Mashed this year. I don't know anyone else who is going, so get in touch in you have a great idea I can work on when I get there.