I live just along the coast in Dorset. If I turn left out of my road I'm heading back home to London and Chris's Time4apint. If I turn right I'm on my way to Devon and Cornwall.

 

Copy.

The only location where I’ve pursued vintage watches in Cincinnati is at my watchmaker’s location, Mt. Washington Jewelers...I’ve purchased a handful of railroad grade pocket watches from his collection.

 

Sunshine Coast QLD Australia, a lonely place for OF members

 

The bad news: Zee Maps, the company providing this service has changed the terms of use and has locked our map and is demanding on order of 20 USD per month to restore access. Like true professionals, they did this in a blog post with four days notice.

The good news: That this could happen was not unanticipated, and is the reason that the ability to export data was a key requirement for the service we used. I have made semi-regular exports/backups of this data over time, and will have all but maybe the very last few pins in a backup.

Assuming I can find a comparable service to accept imports, I will migrate the data and change my links in previous posts to the new destination.

Failing that, I can just publish the data in a Google Sheet? I can add a search or sort function to that, ...and accept/screen new submissions via Google Forms. We won't have a pretty map with pins, but we can have the data.

And then that can work for a while until they kill it off or start charging for it. These are the risks of living life freemium.

 

https://www.google.com/maps/about/mymaps/

 

Yep. I also settled on this as the most stable solution going forward, as the core data will now live in a Google Sheet. And it's almost ready. Just adding some admin/support interface for people who need to update or modify their info.

The map lives.

 

Thanks, this is a fun idea.

What these guys did certainly is not unique. photobucket.com did a similar screw job in recent history. Just makes my mistrust of "free" storage and the like even greater.

 

Never use a free service to hold your only copy.

 

Oh, trust me. I have backups of backups of backups. The stuff in the cloud is pure fluff.

I use imgur only for sharing pictures on a certain forum that just recently "upgraded" so one can upload pictures directly so imgur is likely to go fallow.

I have thought about a Carbonite account for my pictures and some legal and financial files but so far I've only thought about it.

I have some email stuff that is cloud only. But it's just ephemera until the Independent Prosecutor subpoenas it...

 

I live by the old axiom drilled into me by many neckbeards in many different server rooms (back when we still had server rooms):

"If the data doesn't exist in at least three places, it doesn't exist."

And of course those places need to be separated physically/geographically. We could start a whole other thread about data hygiene and backup routines.

 

Alright, and...we're back. Locations are now published in Google's MyMaps, which offers some great features. Namely, a more powerful search function. It's now a lot easier to view a collection of members by city, state, or country – or locate an entry for a particular user with a few keystrokes in the search field.

The data is also centralized in a Google Sheet, which improves portability to other services, and also makes graphs and other visualizations easier.

---

The reconstituted map is here: https://bit.ly/OFglobal

The place to create, edit or get help with entries is here: https://bit.ly/whatcity

(or PM me).

---

In a year or two Google will have likely have expanded their Fusion Table API to work with MyMaps, and all of it can be a little more automated. Until then, there is still some curation going on in the background, but it's fine. Not a lot of data to deal with at present.

If you're new to this thread, and thinking, "eh, what?" – check the first page of this thread. Then maybe consider adding yourself.

 

Cool & Thanks!

 

Excellent, many thanks for doing this. Now, if I can just figure out how to delete my old Spain entry and just keep the one in UK...

Regards, Chrid

 

We appreciate you taking the trouble to fix this for us. A fun Forum thread!

 

Thanks for your efforts!

 

Consider this your World Cup 2018 update! Where the US is not only included, but sits firmly in the lead.



You can add/edit your location here: https://bit.ly/whatcity

Or just view the map and members here: https://bit.ly/OFglobal

 

Herndon VA

 

Go Dawgs!

 

United Kingdon, Oxford

 

At 25,000 members a few years ago, would be interesting to see full figures of people by country.