Povo Boston: Tag "site developments" on New on Povo

Last.Fm Widget Available

2010-02-10T03:19:21.5900000

April 27, 2009

You probably were only marginally aware you had a member page (www.povo.com/~yourpovoname). We have lots of work to do to make that an interesting place to put relevant information about yourself, but I guess we have to start somewhere. I (djMax) wanted to put the music I'm listening to on my page, so I added the [1] widget as a template. Very simple usage:


{{Povo:Secure Templates/LastFm | Username = whatever}}

See the example at right.

Signin and Signup to Povo with Twitter

2010-02-09T22:19:21.5900000-05:00

April 26, 2009

Povo is now integrated with Twitter's API for both signin and signup as well as "tweeting" your Povo edits if you so choose. To link your accounts, just sign out and sign back in with your twitter account, and then signin with your Povo account when prompted. From then on you can choose whether edits you make are tweeted on your behalf by Povo. Fun.

Please let us know if you have any trouble or suggestions.

"Triple Search" on the Home Page

2010-02-09T22:19:21.5900000-05:00

April 22, 2009

It's not that we've been doing nothing, but most of our recent activity has been behind the scenes or sales oriented. We're picking up the pace on the site a little bit. Today, Hasty changed the search box on the home page to search tags, listings, and places (e.g. streets, addresses, land cover) all at the same time. This is the first step towards merging the "what/where" boxes into a single box. We've been back and forth on this a million times, and probably will continue to do so, but try out the triple search box and let us know how it feels.

GetSatisfaction.com and Povo

2010-02-09T22:19:21.5900000-05:00

April 22, 2009

We'll be moving our feedback "systems" to [1] over the next weeks. It's not that we have a huge customer support load, but they just seem to have a nice set of tools and a "public forum" mindset that matches well with Povo. See you there, and ask some questions so we don't look so new.

Wear Povo High Fashion Gear

2010-02-09T22:19:21.5900000-05:00

October 17, 2008

We've made a line of high-fashion Povo clothing. Ok, well the "high fashion" thing is a bit of a stretch, but the shoes are pretty cool. We've used a tool called Wordle to take all the text on pages in a neighborhood (the South End for now) and highlight the most common phrases. It makes quite a representative and visually attractive summary of the characteristics of an area! We've put these Wordle's on T-Shirts (mens and womens) and shoes.

We also include a QR Code (Wikipedia), which leads to the South End QR Code Page describing the gear. People can take a photo of the back of your shirt or shoe using one of the variety of reader applications (e.g. BeeTag, NeoReader) and find out more. If you want one for your neighborhood, let us know!

See the Povo Store on Zazzle.

create & buy custom products at Zazzle

Use Povo by Email!

2010-02-09T22:19:21.5900000-05:00

October 2, 2008

In a perfect world, Povo would be accessible on any device, anywhere. We're not there yet because we're just not big enough to have the resources to write for every mobile device, etc. But we did just expose some basic services to mobile devices via email. To use these services, append "@povo.com" to the addresses listed below:

photos - attach a photo and it will automatically upload it to your member images. If you include the name of a listing in the subject, it will automatically add the image to the gallery for that listing! If it can't find one, no worries, you can go to [Special:Orphaned/Images|the orphaned images] page and add them later.
search - include your search in the subject line, such as "pizza near Appleton Street" or "park in South End" and Povo will email you back the top 5 search results and a link to more information.

The search interface is also exposed via Twitter, so you can direct message Povo on Twitter with a search specified as in the email version and well reply with a super short collection of results. (Usually only 3 fit the 140 character limit of twitter). And even niftier, if you use Twitterific or another client that lets you add your location to your tweets, we'll use that as a location from which to search. So this tweet:


http://maps.google.com/?q=42.346469%2C-71.069264&ll=42.346469%2C-71.069264 kid friendly

Would do a search around our offices for kid friendly things. Remember to befriend/follow Povo first, or it can't reply to your messages.

More ideas for email-based services are welcome!

Google Local Search Now Integrated

2009-04-27T20:46:13.5800000

July 1, 2008

Povo is an ever-evolving guide to Boston, and obviously it's very early in our lifetime. So we know there are times when we might not have a listing, or our text search doesn't understand some crazy misspelling (this is a really hard problem, if you are a Lucene expert, contact us!). So we've added Google Local Search results to our search results page. If you get no results from us, we'll automatically run the Google search. If you get some results, you have the option to run the Google search at the bottom of that page.

We hope this gives you even more reasons to go to Povo first.

Embed external RSS Feeds in Povo

2009-04-27T20:46:13.5800000

June 27, 2008

Povo is a Creative Commons work, meaning you can take our content and reuse it for free as long as you give us attribution. Because of this, we generally try to "internalize" anything in Povo, such as images, so that you can be sure the work is "complete." We still think this is a goal, but we also have to be realistic. For example, you can embed You Tube videos, but we don't load them into our database. This is partly because we consider YouTube a "stable" content reference: they're unlikely to go out of business anytime soon. Today, we have also created a "super template" (templates that use things like Javascript or special server code) for embedding RSS feeds. The original intent is for things like news stories or blog entries which are not meant to be searchable or persistent on Povo. For example, here's this page as a feed in itself:

Or a feed of news stories purporting to be about the Back Bay (from [1]):

Help Fix Broken Links and Templates

2009-04-27T20:46:13.5800000

June 26, 2008

Whenever somebody uses a Template or makes a link to a Povo title, we keep a "map" of all those associations. This is the foundation of how our custom search engines (like the Parking Search) work. Many times, people make links or call templates that don't exist yet, intending to create them later. Of course, this doesn't always actually get done, and so you end up with "broken" links and templates. So, we have two pages to help see those things now:

New RSS Feeds

2009-04-27T20:46:13.5800000

June 8, 2008

You may not have know, but essentially every page and search on Povo is already available as an RSS feed (Atom format with GeoRSS extensions, to be specific). We've made new specialized feeds for reviews, graffiti, and listing additions which can be accessed on a region basis. For example:

This was originally conceived to add our information to the Outside.in local blog aggregator. Comments are most welcome.