Home › Groups › DIYcity Main Group › DIYtraffic Up in Six Cities - Can We Do More?

DIYcity Main Group

User login

DIYtraffic Up in Six Cities - Can We Do More?

Submitted by John Geraci on 26 February 2009 - 4:35pm to DIYcity Main Group.

If you look at the wiki page where people add links to the instances of DIYtraffic that they've set up for their own area, you will see that the app is now running in Chicago, Fairfax VA, Portland OR, Rockville MD, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

Not bad, but can we go further? How many local instances of DIYtraffic can we get up and running today?

Instructions for installation are here: http://diycity.org/wiki/index.php?title=DIYtraffic_-_Instructions_for_In... and installation is a pretty quick and painless affair. Dan Greenblatt, who spearheaded the development effort, has also offered to configure our version of the app to run additional cities if anyone wants, so if you want a DIYtraffic in your town but don't have a server to put it on, write to him at dan dot greenblatt at gmail dot com and he'll do it for you.

If you do launch a DIYtraffic, be sure to 1) point back to this page explaining it, 2) tell people what it is in the bio area and 3) tweet about it to spread the word.

BTW, DIYtraffic works just fine for cities outside of the U.S., if you give it an RSS feed for local traffic updates. The feed we're currently using, from Yahoo, is only for the U.S. unfortunately (why is that??).

27 Feb03:18

i'm going to attempt to set

By dave_menninger

i'm going to attempt to set one up for cincinnati on my own hosting. it's entirely possible that i will fail, in which case i may ask to be added to the currently running instance. :) thanks so much for building this!

27 Feb03:46

good luck!~

By dan.greenblatt

hi dave - let me know if you have any questions i can help answer re: setting up a diytraffic bot for cincinatti.... thanks for taking on the challenge! (though I hope that it's not too challenging :)

27 Feb04:46

dan, So, far so good. My

By dave_menninger

dan,

So, far so good. My only concern going forward is setting up some system to tell if the process is running and notify me if my host shuts it down or anything.

I do have one question: do you have an idea of the geographical scope covered by the Yahoo traffic feed? Are you putting a radius in your call to the REST API? I don't see a radius parameter being set in the source code but I may have missed it. And the API documentation just says that the default radius "varies". I've got ours set up for "Cincinnati, Oh", but I'm wondering if I should add some neighboring towns, etc, to get better coverage of the area.

thanks,
dave

27 Feb04:56

use 'screen' command

By dan.greenblatt

hi dave -

what kind of machine are you hosting it on? i've been running it on a shared hosting system (Bluehost) and found that ssh-ing in and using the screen command works quite well. See the last post in this thread (or just google for "ssh screen keep process running" or something) for info on how to use it:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=8998953

as far as geographical scope, i don't know about that.... may just be something to be solved with trial and error. you're right, the source doesn't do anything with radius, but it could be added if you think it would be useful? let me know if you find that default parameters get the kind of coverage you need....

dan

27 Feb18:51

Dan, thanks for the tip on

By dave_menninger

Dan, thanks for the tip on the use of the screen command. That is working well for me.

I've noticed that the bot is not picking up any updates from Yahoo for some reason. I don't know for sure if this is because there aren't any updates (which seems unlikely) or if it's failing in some way. I'm not seeing any error messages ( using -vv ). And the twitter portion of the bot works - it responds to direct messages.

Any ideas? Thanks!

10 Mar19:24

more versions of DIYtraffic up around the country

By John Geraci

We've got ten DIYtraffic feeds running around the country now, from the looks of the wiki page.

Would be nice to make this a lot easier to deploy in new cities.

If it took three minutes to do, I think a lot of people would do it.

10 Mar20:16

DIYtraffic

By cataspanglish

I'm trying to set it up in Barcelona, Spain but I can't find an RSS transit feed. Any ideas for another way of doing it?

10 Mar20:22

Barcelona (+ closing this thread & starting one in Discussions)

By John Geraci

Good question, cataspanglish. We found one for London, and people there are working on extending the source files to work for that city. I wonder if there are good RSS feeds for traffic elsewhere?

Also, let's end this thread here, since it's in the Main Group, which should be low volume, and start one in Discussions, which is for people with a higher tolerance for getting lots of email.

Will start a thread there in a bit.