[oliviasculley]

No description provided.

[allella]

This PR is still on the radar, but I did pull it up today and noticed it's not showing under open PRs, even though the list of PRs shows (3) and then only lists (2) PRs. Is there some mystery status on this PR?

[claude]

Code review

No issues found. Checked for bugs and CLAUDE.md compliance.

[oliviasculley]

Probably just a temporary Github bug, when I view the list of open PRs, it appears at the bottom (as the oldest open one)

[allella]

This is far from a complete technical or practical review, but I wanted to finally get something for you to chew on after 4 months.

Thanks for the work on this PR. It's a step in the right direction for a nice UI and API for devs, and probably will see more AI agents use in the near term than we ever had directly from humans.

This will be a great help in decommission the old server in the near-term.

The BIGGER questions surround things pondered a couple of years ago that the primary HG domain and app likely don't need to address.

Maintaining Search / Human Traffic

• We'll need to transition the human search engine or bookmark traffic without breaking the SEO or usability of the old map preview URLs that get the bulk of the traffic and practical use.
• This requires maintaining clean, comparable URL on some domain or subdomain to which we can 301 redirect.
• A quick and dirty implementation would be to 301 the old patterns like https://data.openupstate.org/map/preview/electric-vehicle-charging-stations to
  https://hackgvl.github.io/open-map-data-multi-layers-demo/?lat=34.844526&lng=-82.401078&zoom=10&maps=electric-vehicle-charging-stations,
  • The free hosting and low security concerns are nice, but there are many concerns with simply using the Demo page on a Github pages subdomain as an intermediate or long-term solution.
    • the long and variable URLs with a bunch of query strings create usability, duplicate content, and SEO problems
    • the use of a Github subdomain is not ideal for a lot of reasons
      • it's not trivial / ideal to 301 redirect away from Github pages if we started using the domain as the primary and wanted to change to another domain alter
      • poor SEO vs a custom domain or subdomain
      • confusing / disconnected branding under Github's domain
      • dependency on the whims of mega corp
    • Hosting the demo map, or some variant, on a dedicated domain would solve some, but not all of those concerns.

Pruning / Migrating Layers

• The original map layer spreadsheets are still owned by a Google Workspace account from Code for the Carolinas old fiscal sponsor. That could be deactivated at any moment, so we also need to migrate the spreadsheets we're keeping to HackGreenville's shared Google Drive. I moved coworking and breweries over in the past, so there's already an established pattern for that.
• We increasingly have stale or hardly used map layers beyond what we had in mid-2024 when I checked which layers were actually getting traffic.
• The iMAP project between Prisma / Furman / Greenville County seems to be be dead. The ArcGIS links (ex. for Recycling) and the iMAP application no longer work .
• We have dozens of basically unsupported County / iMap layers with no maintainers or spreadsheet.
  • Many / most of them are low / no traffic and/or not something that's aligned enough to be showing directly under the HG domain.
  • We could do a campaign to find new maintainers a consider some layers with no maintainer interest for the scrap heap
  • Some of the data we have for the Swamp Rabbit Trail is coming through OpenStreetMaps and/or Mike Nice. It would be good to better sync things between our spreadsheets and what's contributed back to OpenStreetMaps as part of their tile data.
• The Swamp Rabbit Trail main path layer is currently wrong. It's showing the same path data as the Spurs and Connectors. We'll need to fix that.
• We should still talk with Bennett and the Bike Walk Greenville folks to coordinate all the things related the layers, API, and storing the syndicated or original data.

Separation of Concerns

• It was convenient to have a dedicated data domain, separate from HG and Code For Greenville, as the catch all for human traffic and developers alike. Though, it was never a well polished publish facing site or a well used developer site.
• Publicizing the technical stuff fits the hackgreenville.com domain, given HG Labs manages the project. However, I don't see that we'd want to cram 50 random and/or stale map layers into the SEO and structure of the primary HG domain.

[oliviasculley]

Thanks for the thorough review, @allella! I first brought the branch up to date with the latest develop (resolved the nav/CSS conflicts from the design-system merge), then pushed ccd38ef addressing the inline code feedback:

• Reusable LIKE macro — extracted the wildcard-escaping into a whereLikeContains() Eloquent Builder macro, now shared by the Events and Map Layers API controllers.
• Slug lookups — added an exact-match slug filter to the Map Layers API for clean 1-to-1 queries alongside the fuzzy title search.
• geojson_link vs geojson_url — documented the remote-source vs HG-hosted distinction in the Filament form and the API docs.
• Sync hardening — JSON_THROW_ON_ERROR on encode, stricter GeoJSON structure validation, and skipping CSV rows with out-of-range coordinates. Added tests for each.

Replied inline on each thread with specifics.

On the bigger-picture items (301-redirecting the old data.openupstate.org preview URLs and SEO, migrating the layer spreadsheets off the old fiscal-sponsor Workspace, pruning stale County/iMAP layers, the Swamp Rabbit Trail path fix, and the separation-of-concerns question of what belongs under the primary HG domain) — I agree these are important but they're each their own effort beyond this PR, which is focused on standing up the Map API + pages so we can start decommissioning the old server. I'd suggest we capture them as tracking issues so they don't get lost. Happy to open those if you'd like.

[bogdankharchenko]

@oliviasculley is there anything I can do to move this forward? I noticed this PR is sitting here for a while.

[oliviasculley]

I'll rebase the ticket to fix the merge conflicts, but I think it's a matter more of agreement to get this merged than code

[oliviasculley]

Let me consult with AI if there's a better architecture that can be done

[oliviasculley]

Rebased onto latest develop and addressed the remaining review threads in 55534c0:

• Renamed geojson_link / geojson_url → geojson_remote_link / geojson_local_url
• Added map:sync --delay= and a 1s pause on Filament Sync All
• Stopped tracking synced GeoJSON in git (files remain on disk, ignored locally)

The GeoJSON schema validation thread was already implemented earlier; marked it resolved.

[allella]

I'm still of the mind that we should get folks together and come up with a migration and pruning plan for the data.

If we set this live on the HG site without migrating things, we'll end up messing up the SEO and such, as noted above, we've built up over the years, continuing to support stall layers that we might be able to prune, or having duplicate resources on the web until we do some proper redirects and such.

@oliviasculley would you be free in the coming weeks for a face to face? I think at least you, me, Mike Nice, Bennett Meares would be good, and perhaps an HG committee member (Pam or Bogdan).

[oliviasculley]

having the query parameters I think is best practice since it lets the urls be bookmarkable, and is tolerant for page refreshes etc. I would like to move/bundle the map to render on a proper url instead of the github url, but it's mainly been administrative issues I think that has stopped that. I'm not really that interested in working through the issues to get this mergeable, I mostly just wanted to push this up and get the conversation started so I can do the implementation work to get it to an acceptable solution, but I'm okay with this not getting merged until then