Offbeat Eats

January 27, 2011 5:00 PM

Offbeat Eats
Since late 2005, I've been tracking some of the more interesting places I've eaten, mostly so that other travelers can find some of the more obscure places I've enjoyed. The latest effort has been porting the whole thing to wordpress and getting full geotagging working so that you can easily see my places by category and map. Feedback wanted, since I'm trying to make this sight actually useful to people.
posted by kaszeta (13 comments total)

Nicely done. Love the layout. The map defaulted to the UK when I first got to the site, which almost caused me to click away thinking this was a Europe only thing. Maybe think about pulling the default map view out a few clicks so it is apparent that there are pins on both continents?
posted by COD at 6:38 PM on January 27, 2011

Thanks. The goal was to have the map at the top show recent stuff, and the little map on the sidebar show the whole range, but that interplay has been a bit weird. I'll reset the top map's default zoom and see how that goes.

(Part of the whole history here is that the old site used an iframe containing a Google My Maps, and that *didn't* scale well. Now at least it's generated on the fly, and I get to set the limit of how many map pins are used)
posted by kaszeta at 6:42 PM on January 27, 2011

Nice work! Are you using the Maps API directly?
posted by circular at 7:05 PM on January 27, 2011

Well, It's based off of a theme from Woothemes that does the heavy work (that I've heavily customized and tweaked), but yeah, it calls the API directly. Still tweaking some of that, actually.
posted by kaszeta at 7:12 PM on January 27, 2011

This is pretty rad! I wish you've been to the Los Angeles area more...maybe in the future. :) I'm really enjoying browsing posts via random map clicking.
posted by sawdustbear at 2:05 PM on January 28, 2011

I used to go out to LA for work on a regular basis (with so many trips to El Segundo and Manhattan Beach, I think I've eaten *everywhere* in those towns that existed up through 2008). Hopefully again sometime soon. San Diego and Temecula more likely, I've got relatives there. Where I blog is more by happenstance than planning. :)

Next up, though, is Austin (going to do a bbq tour and food cart tour with friends).
posted by kaszeta at 3:13 PM on January 28, 2011

How about placing the website link at the bottom of the review. I couldn't see the link for Au Pied Du Cochon (the black on bue is not very readable) and scanned the page twice before seeing it beside the map.
posted by glambo at 1:33 PM on January 29, 2011

Not a bad idea. I'll work on that (although a lot of these places don't, and won't, have web sites)
posted by kaszeta at 4:32 PM on January 29, 2011

The envy... it burns. Well done blog. Very well done.
posted by madred at 4:25 PM on January 30, 2011

Thanks. I'm mostly just um, "lucky" to go to the places I do. (Well, some of the places are indeed lucky. Some, I'm making the best of a bad draw...0
posted by kaszeta at 6:06 PM on January 30, 2011

Manhattan Beach had some good places, but I lived in Smell Segundo and I don't remember a single good food place. Enlighten me, Kaszeta!
posted by terrapin at 5:15 PM on February 2, 2011

Places that I've enjoyed in El Segundo are Mandy's, La Sirena, El Tarasco, and O Shun.
posted by kaszeta at 8:17 PM on February 2, 2011

El Tarasco I do remember!
posted by terrapin at 4:54 PM on February 3, 2011