Syd Lawrence

I’m just this guy

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Discovering distance to a location using javascript

I saw @MrQwest tweet the other day that he was going to be creating something that showed the user something different if they were near a location. He asked Twitter if anyone had done something similar.

Last Christmas I was asked to make a web site for the launch of the latest Rolling Stones’ greatest hits album Grrr. For the launch, the Stones were having a pop up shop on Carnaby Street. Polydor, the label the band is signed to, wanted to be able to allow fans to listen to the album via their mobile phone if they were within a mile of the store while they were shopping. It would also allow fans to listen to the album easily and for free while in the pop up store before they decided to buy the album.

For this example I checked using the new(ish) HTML5 JavaScript geolocation API for the user’s location:

navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(result) {
    var location =
...

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How come so few of you have been to a hackday?

I go to quite a few hackdays, and as we all live in our own little bubbles to a certain degree. It was really interesting for me to discover something the other day. I was speaking at Generate Conference, .net Magazine’s new conference, and I asked a simple question. The question I asked was how many in the room had ever been to a hackday? I was extremely surprised with the answer. Off the 150 or so audience members only 4 people put up their hands. That’s less than 3% of the audience.

Finding this fewer number of hackday participants at Generate Conference was a shock to me, and it made me think.

Why?

This is an honest question, please let me know on twitter @sydlawrence. I’ll update the post with any questions and my responses.

I have a few thoughts of my own. Is it for any of these reasons?

Too Competitive?
I’m not good enough?
Why should I bother?
I don’t know about them until...

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