With the Flexible Map WordPress plugin you can embed a map of your meetings in real time. This will add pinpoints of each meeting location which are clickable and display basic info about the meeting. One of the ways I’ve found this useful is I can easily tell when a meetings geocode is way out of wack.
We’ll start by adding and then activating the Flexible Map plugin. Then go to Settings -> Flexible Map and enter your Google API key as shown.
Watch the video!
Making a Weebly BMLT Satellite from Little Green Viper on Vimeo.
The latest release of the root server (v2.10.3), has some exciting new features. It introduces a new response endpoint called JSONP, or JSON w/padding. Typically making a JSON request/response requires that both the client and the server are on the same exact domain. This is a by design security feature of most modern browsers to prevent XSS (Cross Site Scripting Attacks).
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NOTE: As of Root Server version 2.12.0, meetings cannot be saved without a Google Maps API Key.
As most of you have probably already found out, Google now enforces HTTPS and API keys in their Maps.
This results in:
1) the dreaded “Oops! Something went wrong!” display:
NOTE: In the Root Server, this results in the map display shown as “all blue,” with no map displayed. Also, the “Set Longitude and Latitude to Address” button will not work.
2) and/or the “Unable to Determine Your Location” display:
This happens if you try to use a location-tracking feature, like the “Find Meetings Near Me” button in the Satellite.
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UPDATE: Sandwich is End-of-Life now and replaced by Tomato.
Earlier this year, a mysterious chap who goes by the tag “radius314” created a BMLT spinoff project, called “Sandwich.”
Sandwich is a BMLT Root Server “aggregator.”
That means that it can take multiple Root Servers, and present them as if they were one single, unified Server.
You can say that again.
I’ve had a number of folks ask me (sometimes, “ask” is a rather mild term for the manner in which they approach me) why meetings tend to be marked as “Closed” in data dumps and listings.
There’s a very simple, good reason for this:
The VERY WORST thing that can happen to a meeting, or a Service body, is that someone attending a meeting (often, a family member of an addict in attendance) is thrown out of a meeting. They will usually take the person they attended with when they leave, and never return to NA again. They will often also say bad things about NA in many venues.
NOT GOOD.
Compounding this, is that meetings are often held in…less than upscale…neighborhoods, and throwing someone (like a middle-aged, middle-class woman who attended with her teenage daughter) out could actually put them in direct physical danger.
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Today, I’m releasing an Alpha version of the BMLTiOSLib (further documentation will appear as I get closer to release).
If you have used the NAWS Export Functionality of the BMLT to send synchronization dumps to NAWS, you have received a spreadsheet in reply, with a series of meetings that have revised or newly-assigned Committee Codes (what we call “World ID” in the BMLT).
These are fairly long sequences of numbers, prefixed by one or two letters, like so:
These need to be assigned back to your BMLT database in order to ensure continued synchronization with NAWS.
It should be noted that NAWS tracks GROUPS, not MEETINGS.
Groups are Service entities. They are the driving force behind meetings, and often a single Group can have multiple meetings (like clubhouses, or lunchtime meetings).
In these cases, you may apply the same World ID (NAWS Committee Code) to multiple meetings.
It is very much worth it to keep NAWS in sync with your database, so this operation is important.
Thankfully, NAWS has agreed to do a certain thing that makes this process fairly easy to automate.
This post will spell out a somewhat “high geek factor” way of doing it. I will be working on a tool to abstract the complexity, but that will be a little while in coming. The tool to make this easier is here.
It is strongly recommended to backup your database before doing this process.
With Root Server 2.13.0 or above you can now log in as Server Admin and click Server Administration. This will now allow you to upload your NAWS dump to automatically update your Committee Codes.
Upon successful completion you will get a popup window that tells you how many meetings were updated, or a warning if there are any problems.
If you do not have Root Server 2.13.0 or above you should get it, otherwise continue below.
OK. I have completed adding all the basic functionality to the BMLTiOSLib project.
I still need to add stimulus support for these to the test harness app.
Once I have validated the library with the test harness, I’ll write some small sample usage apps in both Swift and Objective-C.
There’s probably still a month or more to go before the library is ready for me to call it “done,” but it’s in great shape.
So far, the Root Server and the various Satellites seem to be working well.
I’m in the process of releasing an updated version of the awesome BMLTAdmin app. The update won’t add any new functionality. It’s merely a tweak for the latest Apple iOS version (iOS 10). The original version still works fine, so there’s no urgency to update.
So what I’ll be developing will be an iOS framework for people that want to develop iOS apps for the BMLT. It will abstract all server communications using an Observer Pattern (Apple calls it “delegates“).
This will be a “dogfood” project, which I will use to create the next version of the iOS BMLT app, and, eventually, a new version of the BMLTAdmin app.
The whole idea is to make it insanely easy to write iOS apps that will interface with the BMLT.
I’ve done this kind of thing before, and it will work out great. It may take a few months, though, because I do this kind of thing extremely carefully. This will be an “infrastructure-level” framework, and needs to be of the absolutely highest quality possible. I’ll also need to write some fairly comprehensive documentation.
It will be written in Swift, and will require a fairly current version of the operating system (never an issue with Apple, but a huge problem with Android, and one of the reasons that I don’t program Android). It will abstract the JSON variant of the Semantic Interface.
Here is the repo for the project.
At the time of this writing, there’s still a long way to go.