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Posted13 days ago
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In those days there were no cell phones, and I didn't know much web development. Now, with GPS embedded into photos, this is perhaps a really easy site to build.
But I don't want to deal with user moderation. And I don't want the burden of continual maintenance.
I was also concerned that a side effect would be really nice, not frequently visited spots will suddenly overflow with tourists. A much tougher problem to crack.
I don't think I'll ever get around to it. Someone convince me otherwise. Or better yet, build it for me. :-)
https://github.com/openbenches/openbenches.org/
It is fairly standard PHP + MySQL.
We use Auth0 for authentication - people editing have to use a social network to log in. That significantly reduces (but doesn't eliminate) the need for moderation.
As for maintenance - once in a while dependabot will say a PHP library is out of date and I'll run the update.
Please do launch your project; it sounds like fun
I'm very surprised it was able to get this much traction despite being launched only 8 years ago, long after the heyday of these sort of sites. How'd you do it?
OK, it was a mixture of things. I told my friends about it and they were sufficiently nerdy to try it out.
I responded to early feedback - specifically about creating a leaderboard. Originally it was all anonymous but people wanted to see how well they'd done.
My wife and I gave an interview to a local BBC radio station which gave it a little bump. Similarly, when it is mentioned on reddit and other sites we pop up and talk about it.
It was also picked up by a couple of academic papers, which gave it a bit of credibility. As did our recent integration with OpenStreetMap.
There's a far amount of schema.org metadata which probably helps with SEO.
But, other than that, who knows? I've had plenty of projects which didn't do as well. Sometimes the Web rewards nice things.
I'm an OSM mapper & enjoy linking mapped benches to their profiles on OpenBenches. It gets hairy, though, when a single bench features multiple memorial plaques. Wonder if you'd consider revising your data model to permit multiple inscriptions per bench?
I can only hope to be remembered by anyone as fondly as some of these people.
There are a lot of trees with similar sort of sponsorships and commemorations... wonder if a spin off would be something like opentreebutes.org ?
I am jaded. Then again I come from a family where people go to funerals to gloat and start fights.
I will expect with sadness the day that the author complains about bot spam on his benches website.
Without upvotes/likes/etc. as a "quality filter", you tend to read more comments written in broken English with poor grammar and so forth. I consider that an acceptable price to pay, in exchange for no viral memes, ragebaiting, etc.
The power of the memorial that morning had me daydreaming what it would be like to be a grandpa watching my grandkids running around the playground. That's where I want to be immortalized: not in a lonely cemetery but on a warm park bench, relaxing and enjoying the best things about life.
My youngest migrated his play to the swing set and called me over for help. I loaded him in and began pushing while thinking of old Everett, maybe pushing his own grandson, maybe in this very swing.
And then I noticed what was written just above my son:
In a breath my mind corrected the error in my daydreams and a freight train punched through my gut, leaving me unable to breathe. My heart sunk and fell out the bottom of me as I struggled to keep pushing my son. I'd find out later that my son in that moment was older than Evvy would ever be. It's been years and I still wrestle with this memory every time my kids play on a swing set.
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