myCommute Prototype

Published on 5 July 2005 in , , ,

Some time ago I mentioned backstage.bbc.co.uk and a couple of ideas I’d had around travel feeds.

Well I’ve been messing around and I’m happy to announce that myCommute now has a working prototype.

Basically you select which railway companies and tube lines you want travel information, and you get it. You can then bookmark the URL for future use – in the future I’ll add an option to remember your choices in a cookie. Right now you can also chose an RSS version too.

There’s actually been a working prototype up and running for some time, but last night I re-worked it, adding in some extra data feeds and making the code a bit cleaner and more robust, although I did have to just pop in this evening to redo it again as it was being very slow!

I’m still playing round with the basics – one thing I want to do is make the thing look a bit prettier – but the core functionality of munging the data feeds is all there so it works. Of course it’s usefulness relies on good data being pumped into it, but on the whole the BBC Travel feeds aren’t bad at all, so you tend to get some good, reliable information.

What is a bit disappointing is that it took me five months to get a proper working version out in the wild. But these things happen.

UPDATE: well it would actually be useful if the feed file was updating – I’ve just noticed it hasn’t been updated since the end of June… Oh dear! I’ll have to let people at work know tomorrow.