Wifi cafes, beyond San Francisco

Aug 24, 2006 by Andre
My community-driven wifi cafe site now takes listings outside of San Francisco. You can add a cafe in any city (in the US), and the city will automatically be listed in the sidebar. I also made a few UI enhancements, including different map icons to distinguish free from paid hotspots.

Feel free to start adding wifi cafes in your own city. The site is http://http://hotspotr.com

Comments

1

Steffen Christensen on Aug 24

Obvious question: Why not beyond the US?

2

Andre Lewis on Aug 24

Steffen, honestly only because xAL (the internationalized address format which the Google geocoder uses) is complicated, and I'm not sure how to reliably extract structured address info outside the US. http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ciq/ciq.html#6. I might tackle it in the future though.

3

Tim Burks on Aug 24

Hi Andre, I'm glad you've extended this. I've added two of my Silicon Valley favorites and will add more later. I've noticed that your map only shows markers for one city at a time; that's no problem for a big city like San Francisco, but down here our cities are smaller :-) Also, the "directions" links seem hard-coded to SF. But those are minor issues. Thanks for this great site!

4

Andre on Aug 24

Hey Tim, thanks for letting me know about the directions link, I just put up the fix (gotta love deployment with capistrano!). I think the solution to the one-city-at-a-time is to let people tag cities as "metro areas," i.e., you could tag Mountain View as "South Bay," Peninsula," etc. Next update ;-)

5

Scott Rafer on Oct 11

Hi, a million years ago (mid-2001), a couple of us did something similar: wifinder.com We're going to start putting energy back into it. Interested in ganging up?

6

Andre on Oct 12

Hey Scott, I'll drop you an email and see what's shakin'

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