Well we learned the hard way that parsing messages correctly is hard when it is coming in different formats. As we make the BETA public, the messages that we recieve have had unexpected formats. We think we have addressed this for now and the system is now cooking again.
System is Temporarily Down
We are having issues retrieving messages sent to the inbox. We are working on it now, hopefully we will have everything back up and running shortly.
Active Monitoring
I just finished and enabled active monitoring. The website will now show if the whats my train application is running and accepting requests or not.
Bug Fix: Late Night Trains
Fixed a bug that would cause certain train times to not display during late hours.
Request for trains at 11pm would not show early morning trains for the next day. 12am, 1am trains would not display.
All available trains should now return properly.
Alerts Now Active
Alerts are now active on Whats My Train.
To get rail alerts send a message to hey@whatsmytrain.com using any of the following formats:
Alert [station-name]
Alerts [station-name]
Alert [origin name] to [destination name]
Alerts [origin name] to [destination name]
We are still ironing out how alerts display on the NJ Transit RSS feed, we fix any problems as we see them. If you have any problems please let us know.
Better Spell Check
We have updated the spell checking algorithm to accurately return best 3 matches.
Previously we would only suggest the best match and two other matches. While this was useful it wasn’t entirely helpful.
We have also setup the spell checker to check permutations of a station name
Example: “NYP”, “NY Penn Station”, etc.
Hopefully these improvements make Whats My Train more enjoyable to use!
Working On: Alerts
Working on retrieving Alerts using NJ Transit Alert RSS.
Usage Examples:
Alerts NYP to Oradell – will return any active alerts on all lines used in this route
Alerts Oradell – will return any active alerts on this station’s line
We will have this active shortly. As it is now we are testing as alerts show up in the system, we do not know the concrete format of the alerts but have made our “best guess” as to how they will look.
NJ Transit’s RSS is poorly formatted, wish they had Line name as an XML tag but we can’t always get what we want 😛
Database is up and running!
We are now running on MS Visual Studio C# Express development environment with SQL Express 2008 backend DB. whoooo…. Now we can better keep track of what users search for to further improve our system.
Silly me.. silly IE
Fixed a display bug in IE where the margin:auto style was not being applied correctly. I have been assuming that the simplicity of the website should allow IE and firefox to render it the same… haha Wrong!
IE does not apply margin:auto correctly (IE6 and IE7) however it (incorrectly) applies text-align:center to the position of the div that its attached to. So I had to text-align:center the container div and then text-align:left the inner div to fix the text. Now everything looks similar in IE and FF… and there was much rejoicing.
Rail Alerts
New Feature:
– Receive alerts for specified station.
Example: “Alerts Oradell” will return any alerts on the Pascack Valley Line.
How we’ll get it done:
- Match Station name to Rail Line
- Read NJ Transit Alerts RSS feed
- Return any active alerts on RSS feed for specified Rail Line