Brickbuildr has been up and running since since 2007… That’s 12 years now. It started out as a way to view LEGO MOCs, built with Flickr’s API. Then morphed into a site hosting PaB information from around the world — the information was crowd-sourced. From there, BrickJournal and I hosted a FOL calendar of events on Google Calendar; and tried to open the calendar up to the community (for more updates via crowd-sourcing). That changed when we gave the responsibilities over to  Swooshable.com, but now, that looks like that endeavor is dead… I think there’s a calendar being maintained over on LAN now, but it’s not every user friendly… personally, I’d like to see events in my country, or see some type of classification of events (conventions, displays, vs. club meetings, etc.).

I’ve been busy adding new stores and going back through old emails to make site improvements. I’m finding new time to revisit old plans/back-burner projects… I’m not promising anything, but hopefully there will be some improvements in the near future.

I’m also thinking about the web-site’s future… I think the PaB part is important — looks like I out lasted my competition. The site owner succumbed to life and shifting priorities. The code that ran that site is now on GitHub. Not to talk bad about the competition, but now looking at the code, it confirmed something I always suspected — he started off by scraping the HTML from my site to build his. And to be honest, later on, I took a few ideas from his site to improve BrickBuildr. 😉

It’s not an easy task to come up with a GUI that allows you to edit 72-ish bins, with over a few dozen of color, and possible thousand of parts in various shapes and sizes, that’s easy to use on a desktop, mobile phone, or ipad… I had talked to a friend of mine in mobile development if there was a way to use the camera to identify the color and part, using some AI on the back-end, to use that as a method for updating the web-site… I didn’t get a resounding, “that’s a great idea”, but more of a “do you know how much computer power that would take?” response. Meh, oh well.

So mix into this long train of though, I’ve dropped my Flickr Pro account, on the account it’s too much per year… What once started was a web-site built on Flickr’s API, I may end up dropping that aspect of the site. I don’t get many hits from people looking the images on the web-site; people mostly use it for the PaB features… And honestly, I don’t know how many people read this blog… I’ve thought about picking up pod-casting again, but it’s a challenge to find the time & people to talk with… Anyway, more later.

So friends aren’t too keen on the tsunami idea… I was thinking something tasteful and respectful, but the idea was still shot down.  *sigh*  So back to the drawing board few a new water related idea…

Got an e-mail about adding the Liverpool, UK LEGO store the other day — it’s been added.  In the process off adding it, I noticed that there’s to be a 2nd Toronto and Miami store, along with two new stores in California soon — this is exciting.

Some new parts have been showing up on the wall as well — I’ve been updating the database.  If I’ve missed anything, please let me know.

One of the suggestions that have come up for iPaB has been some type of indicator of how full a wall container is… I think way back when I started this project, I had a similar idea — not only would I like to know what parts are on the PaB wall, but how plentiful are they.  So I looked for a ‘progress bar’ example in CSS, found it simple enough to implement on a web page; added a field to the database, updated the form, did a little testing and voilà!  By indicating ‘near full’, you see the a bar like (6,1); ‘near empty’ will be like (5,1); ‘quarter full’ will be like ‘(6,2); ‘half full’ the bar will be like (6,3); and ‘three quarters full’ will be like (6,4).  I might work on touch up the graphic a little, but let me know what you think.  Hopefully you’ll find is useful.

In the mean time, I’ve added two new stores, Brighton, UK and Milton Keynes, UK.