Development Blog

In case you haven’t noticed (Ha!) I haven’t done much (anything) with INATN recently. During my previous job when I was temping after getting laid off, I had lots of free time (and unfettered internet access) and was able to build up the site to what it is now. Now that I’m back at a full-time job, I don’t have quite as much time, and even if I did, out network and PCs are buckled down tight making website maintenance difficult. And as many of you know, after working all day, when you get home to your spouse and kids, soccer practice, Cub Scouts, etc., spending more time in front of the computer coding is not tops on my list of things to do.

The site is in Maintenance Mode, meaning that I will do what needs to be done to keep it operational, making adjustments if the PQ format changes, rebooting the server every now and then to keep things running smoothly, etc., but don’t expect to see much in the way of new features.

I know people love the stats, and especially the county maps, so I have no intention of shutting things down, but I probably won’t be very responsive to feature requests or other questions. If things go south, somehow I always manage to find out and usually it’s just a server reboot that makes it all better. If everybody suddenly can’t get things to work right, I’ll take a closer look.

Otherwise, thank you to everyone who has supported the site, either by donations or just passing along a good word.

-Dave

The table that holds the information for every cache log (1.6 million records big) crashed and wouldn’t allow any new entries, which explains all the “Divide by zero” errors. (Records for new uploads weren’t saved, so when the calculations tried to do a caching rate calculation that involved dividing by the zero caches that were processed, it tripped over the math.)

I restored from a backup version, so some data was lost,  but I tested a few uploads and everything seems to be working again.

Caches are coming in with GC ID numbers that have been stripped of the “GC” part, and so far I’m not sure why. Today I did something extreme (which I would have had to do at some point anyway) and purged the database of the wrongly-named caches. If you find your totals to be short, they should be back in order the next time you update with a fresh PQ.

I’ve finally figured out why people are getting caches that they’ve never found in states/countries where they’ve never been. For some reason, the GC number of some caches are getting imported incorrectly. Now, I just need to figure out where in the code this is happening.

I’d like to give a big thank you to Groundspeak for stepping up and volunteering to help pay for the new INATN server. They contacted me out of the blue and offered assistance which I was glad to accept. GS isn’t actually hosting the server themselves, so before you ask, no I haven’t been given direct access to the mother database. Apparently my little ol’ website is an “asset to the geocaching community”, and judging by some of the emails I got when it went down the first time, a lot of you have come to find it useful as well.

So, thanks to Groundspeak for their server support, thanks to those of you who have clicked on the Paypal button and donated to the site (Groundspeak isn’t paying me to work on it; I’m still doing that for free!) and thanks to those of you who have sent me emails and PMs to let me know that you missed the site and that you find my little project helpful in your geocaching adventures!

I did a little mucking about, and I think it might have had something to do with HTML entities (such as ampersands) in the cache names. I was already handling those, but apparently something changed, either with how the GPX files were being created or with the new server’s PHP configuration so that they were no longer being handled correctly.

I just uploaded the My Finds query for myself that I generated today, and it now shows the correct number of finds for me. Please let me know if it doesn’t do so for you.

I mentioned in a previous post that I updated the code to handle the GPS Adventures Exhibit and Whereigo caches. If you’ve got either of those in your finds, but they don’t seem to be showing up properly, please drop me an email. I’m not lucky enough to have gotten my hands on a Colorado (Anyone from Garmin reading this? ), so I don’t have any Whereigo caches to my name, so I don’t actually know what they look like in the My Finds query. Hopefully I’m handling those correctly.

More details to follow, but if you’re reading this, then you’re viewing INATN at its new home!

Edit: A couple quick additions… Whereigo caches and GPS Adventure events should show up correctly now.

The two biggest-hit pages are the main stats page and the top ten page. Amazingly enough, those are also two of the most processor-intensive pages. I’ve split the stats page up into two. Now, the stats page shows the summary section that was at the top of the old page. To see the rest of the stats, just click the link on that page.

For the top ten page, the “wordy cachers” chart was really holding up the page load. I’ve shuffled that table off to a page of its own. I’ve also inserted a couple lines to eliminate logs that were “gaming” the counter by being full of nonsense text.

In the future, I’ll continue to break up pages a bit so that no one page is hogging up all the processor time.

You don’t need to visit the “Classic Uploader” page anymore; I’ve updated the form on the front page so it will process your upload right away.

Currently, there’s 868 GPX files waiting to be processed, and at a rate of one every fifteen minutes, I’ll let you do the math to figure out how long it’ll take to get through that, assuming nobody uploads anything new in that time…

So, (and hopefully this won’t completely b0rk everything up…) I’ll reveal the slightly-secret way to get you files uploaded Right Now…

The INATN “Classic Uploader”

If you’re new to INATN, this was the way everyone used to upload their GPX files. There were problems with the server load, however, so I created the current way to try to distribute the load.

That page has actually existed for awhile; anyone who has been having trouble uploading files using the current method was directed to that page instead. I hesitated on revealing it too publicly, but so much for that.

So, use that page for now. If everything doesn’t come crashing down in a flaming heap on ones and zeroes, I’ll incorporate it back into the main page.