Week Around the -ists

Brock Keeling — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:29:30 GMT

Gothamist found that an explosive set off outside the Times Square army recruiting center may be similar to five past bombings in New York City.
Seattlest worried when severed right feet and bottles of rat poison started washing up on local beaches.
Shanghaiist was surprised by Bjork's rooting for Tibetan independence at her concert (see video), and the political fallout has only just begun.
SFist debated the merits of new bronze plaques that will be placed in locations where San Francisco's homeless have died.
DCist was obliged to respond to the worst Washington Post Outlook column ever published, in which conservative writer Charlotte Allen tried to make the case that women are dumb.
LAist found Satan's ice cream truck trolling the streets, and they recorded the music.
Some crafty Torontoist readers didn't like the dearth of ski hills in downtown Toronto, so they just built one of their own on their deck and (of course) recorded a video of them all taking turns on it.
Bostonist knows the city's subway and bus system, the MBTA, has problems. So does this 17-year-old who submitted a report and told the MBTA brass how to fix it.
Phillyist explored the possibility of an Ivy League prostitute, while their commenters debated the most ethical approach to proving or debunking the story.
Londonist spent a little too much time looking at airbrushed operatic private parts, and enjoyed an enlightening comment from someone who was there.

I Wish...

Matt Baume — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:08:51 GMT

However. That's not to say that NextMuni's work would be done. Oh hell no. There's still a boatload of fixer-upperring to be done on that site. (The graphic design alone looks like something we cobbled together with Frontpage in 1997. Compare that to the shiny web-2.0ey goodness of Boston's MBTA.)

So, readers. If this strictly hypothetical upgrade were to happen in the next few days, and you were in charge of getting the word out, designing methods for presenting the new NextMuni data to riders, and generally sprucing up the website, what would you do? What's on your NextMuni wish list? Here's ours:

- Communication. Feedback. Not a form that gobbles up messages and never responds, but a forum for riders to communicate back-and-forth with the NextMuni team. An engineering blog would be ideal.

- A map of where all the LED prediction signs are, and a schedule of when each stop is going to be getting its prediction sign.

- A text-message-based predictor, allowing riders to get arrival predictions for any stop without needing an LED display. At each Muni stop, there'd be a note on the Muni map that says, "For this stop's arrival predictions, text '18th & Castro, East' to 415-Next-MTA." That way, you can get predictions for stops that don't have an LED sign, and you can get a prediction if you're at a store or a bar down the street from a stop.

- It's been said that the arrival times may be "stale" by up to five minutes. If that's the case, the website should let riders know. The NextMuni page has a note below the times that says "Valid as of 4:27 PM Monday, March 5" ... it would be great if the arrival estimates on the map had a similar time stamp, so users know how old the numbers are.

After the jump: Invisible buses, XML-scraping for home brew hacks, and a secret list!

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Week Around the -ists

I Wish...