Yard Sale Treasure Map

This week I have a short list of things to add/fix.

There were dozens of comments regarding the map advertisement blocking sale content.  I have moved the ad to the bottom of the screen.  Let me know if this does not solve your problem.

Someone made a great comment about having too many sales nearby and wanted a 2 mile radius option. This is easy so you should see this fix by next Friday.

I am still working on making the search feature work properly. Hopefully this will be done before next Friday.

I changed a few things around and now and the Show/Hide Unmappable Sales feature may not always work so I’d like to get this working properly too. For those of you who have not tried this feature, you can use this to scroll through your local sales that I could not find a date and/or address. I need a date so that I don’t send you to yesterday’s sale and I need a proper address to put a marker on the map. I don’t want anyone to miss a sale, so you have the option to scroll through these listings and add the sale to the map yourself.

Please keep the comments coming!

One feature that is painfully absent from any of these kind of mapping web pages is route optimization.  The map should tell you what the fastest route is rather than let you drive in circles and backtracking to hit the next sale.

This is actually a pretty difficult problem to implement.  Lots of math and fancy terms like “traveling salesman”, “np hard” and “ant colonies”.  College math students do research projects to figure this out.  Fortunately for you, the folks at Optimap have agreed to let YSTM use their optimization magic to make your life easier!

I have added an “Optimize Route” button on Step 2 of YSTM.  If you have less than 21 sales mapped you can select this button and your spaghetti route will miraculously transform itself into a efficient trail!

The vision for YSTM was to create a web application to improve on the tedious process of yard sale planning.  Paper maps, post-it notes, newspapers, and hours of research seems to be terribly inefficient, especially in larger urban areas where address locations are not completely obvious.

With the advancements in technologies it was obvious that a better way could be found.

Enter Yard Sale Treasure Map.  This website was created with the following simple goals in mind:

1. Automatically put local sales on a map
2. Allow the user to add other sales or stops (sales from newspapers, a stop for coffee, etc)
3. Provide the means for the yard-saler to plan and order the route
4. Let the yard-saler print a customized map