Map...

[Hack258]

Would there be any interest in doing a 'map' for all the clubs up and down the country? I mean, i would travel to the North of England, if i knew where tracks were, and how long it would take me (2 hours my limit..)

With clubs called something different than where they race....i.e Leven, race in Milton of Balgonie), i thought it would be an idea to get all postcodes together, with what classes they allow...then get them all on one big map, if people were willing?

[Mick002]

Great idea, may need to be a range of maps, TC, buggy, nitro whatever....

Here is my Mid-South Map (10th buggys only so far - thats what we do)

http://tinyurl.com/4nwg32

There must be other formats you could use, pdf's or something.

[TKR DAD]

most club websites give directons to where they race and what classes they race.
and if you google routefinder put in you postcode and the club where you are thinking about racing it will bring up a detailed route and estimate the time your jouney will take allowing for different traffic conditions

[Hack258]

Mick,

That's what i was thinking about. Maybe when you click on the 'marker' it would come up with relevant details :-

The Name of the club :
Address :
Days Ran :
Start Times :
Formula :

Also, could have a map for each class. All it would mean, would be hit your class and a map of all the places would come up for where you can race.

[Mick002]

or..........could go this way,

http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=419448

all tracks/clubs could be on your gps device, how cool would that be !!!

[Steve Cann]

Takes away some of the adventure of racing... That is finding the venue whilst still half a sleep at the crack of dawn on a Sunday! Happy days...

Lost count of the number of times I missed the turning for Stotfold and had to reverse back... And as for finding Middle Barton... Always found it but was never quite sure how... Whenever I took the option of following another going to same venue it always turned out they were more lost than me... And back in those days the Chiltern/Mid-South region had way more venues than now...

[Mick002]

Just been on the RC Clubs page at CentralBooking, has it all.......
worth logging in for the search thingy, awesome :):)

http://www.rcracechat.com/vb/showthread.php?t=45579

http://www.centralbooking.org/cbs/index.php?option=com_cbs&task=cbs2clubs&Itemid=151

[MikeS]

Thanks Mick.

As Mick says, I have now completed and released all the initial functions of the RC Club Listing (http://centralbooking.org). I have more features planned but there is still a lot of information needed to be found for the clubs.

The "club list" currently contains the information on 279 clubs covering all classes of racing, but there may be some which I suspect may no longer be with us. The data is linked to the mapping system to allow you to find information and the location of any club that it knows the location of! Also, for logged in users, there is a proximity search tool that will allow you to search for all clubs within a radius that you specify. It will then draw a circle on the map highlighting the search area, zoom into it, place markers with "hover" tooltips on the map. Then if you click any of the markers it will provide you with a printable list of route/directions as well as drawing the route on the map. You can change routes at will and remove if rquired.

This system is only as good as the quality of the underlying data, which has taken weeks of research to gather. However none of us are perfect, and nor I suspect was some of the information found! So I would encourage you to visit the list and check yours any any other clubs you may be familiar with and let me know any missing or incorrect information please.

Remember, for security and site protection reasons, you need to be registered and logged in and have filled in and saved your drivers profile (so the system knows where you live for the calculations) and the rest is self explanatory and easy to use. Unless you register you will only have access to the plain info list with popup location maps.

Have fun with it, it is a serious tool, being the result of approx 250-300hrs of heavy duty programming, or over approx 1200hrs including development and all the club data research. As more people start to use it will be extremely useful for both users AND clubs. For example I did not know that there were actually 8 clubs within 25 miles of me until I used the system!!!

If you do visit can I ask if you would spend a few seconds clicking some of the Google ads on the site, it costs you absolutely nothing but these will help to pay for the sites hosting.

If you experience any problems, or find a bug, do not hesitate to contact me please with full details of your browser, operating system and web connection speed.

Many thanks - Mike.

[MikeS]

Just a quick update.
After having received a couple of emails from people about getting the system alert message that the search on their address had failed, I was prompted to do some in depth investigation to identify exactly why this was happening.
The reason is, that due to the Post Office's monopoly control over the geocoding in the UK, searches on addresses are done on a different map database, which does not necessarily have the same level of address info in it. Further testing also showed that the problem was related to the street level addresses, a lot of which simply were not in the database. It also subsequently turns out that the search Google API does not handle this situation gracefully, i.e falling back to a higher address level till the search succeeds, so I have added a "reduced search level" check box option for use when the primary search fails, which will now handle the fallback for you.
I have submitted a sugestion to Google about this situation with an option for implementing into the API in a future release.