Review my side project: www.recreationparks.net

Finally a HN project that isn't about technology or social networking but rather something more refreshing, nature. I browsed through the site for about 10 minutes and here is what I think. Please do not feel I am being critical for the sake of being critical. I am an avid kayaker and love camping, hiking, and exploring in federal and state parks around the US South East. Every Friday night, I'm online looking for my next destination. I would love to have a 1-stop-shop to find where to go next.

1. Competition - http://www.floridastateparks.org/ - This is my current favorite parks site and the official source for Florida State Parks. I love most of the features on this site and despite plain-jane design, it's very well developed. I am a kayaker and this site lets me find the parks at which I can go kayaking. However, it does not have an advanced search where I can say "parks with +kayaking, <100 miles from zipcode 33708, +picnic tables" or something similar. If you had a similar search for entire US, that would be wonderful. You already seem to have a lot of the data.

2. Localization - most people want to look for places around their hometown. You have a great start by using ip-location to find my local parks. However, presenting a plain list of 50 parks around my county doesn't help much. You need to tell me what I can do where, easily. While this: http://www.floridastateparks.org/FindaPark.cfm?dist=Southwes... may seem messy, it is better than no activity information because last thing I want to do is end up driving 3 hours to find there is no kayak launch at a park despite the proximity to a river.

3. The front page should have at least one "featured" local park with pics + text. Thay would definitely entice me to give this random park a second look. You can tally up the searches or popular pages for each county/state to determine how to automatically feature a park.

4. State list needs to have names and not just abbreviations.

5. "Related Google Search results" is pretty useless for pages like: http://www.recreationparks.net/FL/seminole/lower-wekiva-rive... - at least to me. It takes up valuable center-screen space. I understand this is an easy way to provide a link to the official site of a park but it doesn't always work and seems very cluttered. I would rather see 'key' park activities or Flickr pics there. Or a featured comment by a user.

6. Can you classify/filter by types of parks? I would rather not see baseball parks and only focus on state parks while someone else would rather see sports parks but not nature parks. Too many parks spoil the google map view. Would be much better to fine-tune the kind of parks that I am interested in. You could have a toggle bar in the header area with: Show "nature parks", "wildlife preserves", "sports parks" and enable all of them by default. If I make a change, save it in a cookie/session and apply it to all the search results. I know this kind of feature is easy and works because I made it for sched.org and users loved it.

7. In addition to type for each park, give each park a type-icon. So it's easier to identify and put it in every place the park is mentioned.

8. A few dream features I have are distance-based. Sort the county list based on the distance from my home county. Sort the search results based on the distance too. Allow me to easily set my home zipcode. Save that in a cookie/session and use that for every page.

9. Contact info - this will be difficult for you but as a user, I want the phone number for any park I am looking at to make sure the river is in navigable condition or to find the parking rates. If you can bring in more information like that into one system, wonderful. If not, figure out a way to link to each park's official site. I would love to know the park hours, entrance fees etc. on your site but I can dig in given the park's official site. If I have to go to Google to find that, I might as well go to other sites like http://www.floridastateparks.org/wekiwasprings/default.cfm that have a lot more information already.

10. Great work so far. Like I said above, do not think I am being critical just to be critical. Me and my friends at http://www.clubkayak.com/greenwave/default.asp would love more resources for parks around the nation. However, given existing valuable sites like http://www.floridastateparks.org/wekiwasprings/default.cfm you have quite a challenge to become our favorite destination. I have only listed Florida-centric links but I can assure you most states have their own recreation park guides and that is what people use. Trying to be a central destination for something that very local is not an easy task. You can accomplish it successfully, if you become a better, easier-to-navigate resource than the local sites.

I understand a lot of your site information will come from users/volunteers so hopefully with time, the value of your content will appreciate. Till then, you will have to get some of that data yourself (hopefully you will pursue legal, moral methods - e.g. NO SCRAPING). You have a long way to go and best of luck with it all.

If you chose a state, say CA, a page that shows all the parks in California appears. The page is rather long and it takes some time to load. My browser actually wanted to stop the script. Maybe you can first show all the counties in CA and then the parks in a specific county.

Besides searching for a park near you, it might be interesting to search for a park near you that has a certain activity, say rock climbing.

I could see this being useful someday soon...

I'm not a fan of the big popup of state abbrevs. First, because some state abbrevs aren't immediately obvious to me (MD and ME I have to stop and think about). Second, because mine is always way at the bottom. (Then I get a mostly-alphabetical list, again sorted by county name.) I wish it would just show me a map and let me click where I am, even just the simplest USA.jpeg with an imagemap to pick a state.

If I type "wa" in the box and click "search", I get the standard Rails "something went wrong" page.

If I type "washington" in the box, I get a bunch of "Washington, DC" parks, followed by a bunch of parks with "Washington" in their name. I admit my forefathers didn't pick the most creative name for my state, but it would be nice if it was a little more forgiving, and show me some Washington parks when I search for "washington".

I can't find either of the parks I usually visit, nor a way to add a new entry. I guess that's version 2. I'd also like to be able to search by what features a park has, which is probably also version 2 (after users have had time to vote!).

i'm in iceland.. tried to find a park here.. didn't find any.. so i'm of no use to you,

good luck anyways!

I like the site quite a bit. It is very functional and serves a good, specific purpose. The search appears to work well, which is nice.

Something to consider, though not trivial, would be tracking local websites to note events at the different parks. Also, an easy thing to mash in would be weather with regard to outdoor activities.

Nice job!

I'd like to get everyone's thoughts about this project. I'd also love to know about other data sources that I should mash into this. I think there is value in exposing public data sources in a structured ways, plus, you know, it'd be cool if the AdSense went somewhere.

Is anyone with IE having issues?

Your IP detection showed parks over 80 miles from my actual location. For these cases, have the radius be much larger, or have the Google Map show locations surrounding the target area.

Dude, the very first thing I did, was press the first button I saw (the search button).

"The page you were looking for doesn't exist."

Needs a little more testing

The voting was confusing. I saw a list of things and a checkbox and assumed that a checkbox meant that that park has that item. Maybe have "yes" and "no" instead.

Under Park Activities, there's no mention of playing fields, tennis courts, etc.

Looks great! What are you using to geotarget?

502 Bad Gateway

dead for me...?

It's down right now. 502 gateway.

Great site! Simple idea, simple design. I like it.

Having said that, the "Google Search" looks messy -- a lot of word-wrapping going on. Some better way to display that?

Also it seems like you can easily run into lots of data sources with something like this. You might end up using a device like a tab. Just a thought.

Some of the links didn't give me any information (YouTube videos in the area) until I clicked on the link. I shouldn't have to click to find out the answer is "nothing here". That's probably impossible to do, but users are like that.

Finally the weather forecast could've used some icons. Seems like people expect icons with weather information.

Just my two cents. Keep up the good work. Awesome idea! A little more tweaking and some SEO work, right?

Serves a purpose. Simple as that. Good job.