Favorite Places mapping web app is now open source

I decided to make my Favorite Places web app (that was the basis for the UMass Favorite Places site) open source. You can now find it on my GitHub page: https://github.com/alexschreyer/My-Favorite-Places In doing so, I made a bunch of improvements and squashed some bugs. Don’t forget to look at the readme.txt file. Please drop me […] Read more..

Read your SketchUp news right inside SketchUp

Have you ever wanted to… make sure you never miss a blog post by the Trimble SketchUp folks? stay up-do-date with your favorite SketchUp blogs? follow what’s going on at SketchUcation? keep an eye on Twitter and Facebook? make sure you never miss any of my blog posts? do all of this while you are […] Read more..

Limit BuddyPress registration by domain

I am currently running a few WordPress installations with the great BuddyPress plugin. If you don’t know this plugin yet: you can create your own social network using this plugin. For example, it is possible to add groups, forums, membership, and even “@” commenting and discussions (like Twitter). Pretty nifty, really. One thing that stumped me […] Read more..

Using robots.txt to your advantage to reduce server load

A little while ago, my hoster (1and1.com) whom I actually like quite a bit, decided that I was using too much of my fair share of the common server and decided to warn me that I was “abusing” the system. They told me that if I didn’t reduce my server load, I would have to […] Read more..

What’s Your Favorite Place at UMass?

I finally got around to writing something about an exciting project that I completed last year at UMass (and which I presented at the Google Geo User Summit 2011 in the meantime). This is the crowdsourcing website application where students, faculty, alumni, employees and visitors to UMass can submit their favorite places on our campus. […] Read more..

Finding Our Favorite Places

A university of 27,000 students and several thousand more faculty and employees is a very complex environment whose spaces and places are experienced differently by different audiences.
This project sought to request feedback from students, faculty, employees and visitors to UMass about their favorite places on campus. This was done by providing a website that allowed to crowdsource feedback by letting users place a pin at their favorite locations and submit a comment.