ecolocal – eco localisation
July 27th, 2006, By Duncan Gough
Since releasing ecolocal.co.uk just over a month ago, we’ve been watching the traffic roll in and making sense of the Google searches that we’ve been attracting. As a developer, I tend to Google for very global terms, but from what ecolocal has taught us, plenty of people are using Google to search for very locally-specific things.
Since ecolocal has been built from the ground up to be a locally relevant website, we’re getting a massive amount of hits from these location-sensitive searches, which is excellent. Because the site is built using Ruby on Rails, it’s easy to use agile development methodologies to tweak the site in response to these highy local searches. In the weeks since it has launches, there have been many small subversion commits containing quick code revisions, more flexible caching methods, commenting upgrades, user notification alerts and so on. And rollbacks too. The subversion log is a funny read – good ideas get committed, then taken down shortly after when we can see they don’t work as we’d like. Backups have been in place since the very beginning, so there’s no danger that we’ll lose any code. Everything is tested before it goes live so there’s no danger that these small, localised code changes will damage anything else. Auto-voting articles and comments you submit should have been there since day one, and it now is. Better location searching is in place, we’re kinder of our providers at geonames.org than ever before. Plenty of spurious HTML bugs have been fixed, RSS feeds are in place, Technorati gets a ping when something important happens. Ecolocal is also part of the wider green network of blogs and sites thanks to green bloggers, hugg and treehugger.com.
On top of all this, we’ve completed work on localisation. From the moment we decided to build ecolocal we planned to support more than just the UK. Switching the code ‘on’ was a simple process – there were only a couple of places where the UK had been hardcoded as a location, so they were removed and a ’set locale’ routine written to let users actively switch between countries. The code for this is in beta but the problems now are more to do with logistics than computer puzzles. Between the two of us, it’s hard to have in-depth knowledge of counties and places around the world. We need help checking that the data is correct and properly formatted but we just don’t have the time.
So what can we do? The opposite, of course. Ecolocal has always been a UK based site, for as long as it has been live. It’s a contrary thing to do on the Internet, in a way, and even in such a short time of being on-line we’ve had discussions on global eco issues, not just UK ones. So we’re going to open up to the global issues and push the local information to one side. That doesn’t mean we’re giving up on local info – or listings of farmers’ markets are massively popular, and we can see that lots of people are searching for farmers’ markets to buy healthy food. Indeed, our events section lets people browse events for the coming weekend and a lot of people do seem to do that. We need tons more data in there for that to become truly useful, though, but we’ve got a few good ideas left to fill that up.
Back to the global issues, we’re going to open up the site to allow more people into the discussions without having to say, “I’m in the US, but…”, since it’s the Internet, after all. A series of tubes, if you will. We’re abstracting away the local information with a layer of global information, reversing the site itself. Currently, local news bubbles up with comments through its county and onto the global UK page. This lets us view local issues as national ones, bringing them to a wider audience. Soon, we’re going to encourage global issues to spark local versions of themselves, throughout as many countries as we can get up and running. We’re in it for the long haul and we’re committed to bringing ecolocal out of the UK and into the US and Europe once the new code is in place.
There are a couple of things left to do – improve the temporal event handling code (recurring events really make the site tick over), take more holidays and day trips to post in the local section (like our Day out with Thomas, from earlier this year) and tidy up a new design that’s easier on the eye.