Herein is Part 2 of the 2021 Spring Cleaning Blog Series, wherein we discuss about cleaning up map data. Read Part 1 here. And then read Part 2 here.

Part of what keeps Pinball Map useful is that we’re constantly massaging, scrubbing, kickflipping, waxing, and buffing the data. And by “we” we mean all of our thousands of users, our ~100 admins, and our Platinum Club über admins (e.g. the four developers). Some of the grubbier data management includes: fixing apostrophes, removing duplicate locations, correcting spelling, removing unnecessary white space, and ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZz.

These are dark and uncharted times. We want to say upfront that we’re very proud of the pinball community for - according to the map usage data - promptly chilling out the moment things really heated up in the U.S. Take a look at the chart below, tracking map user edits for the March 2020.*

Giving away our age here, but back in 2013 we wrote a blog post reviewing various services that automate the Tweeting of RSS items. The use case here is: when there’s a map update (“Jetsons was added Carl’s Shrimp Shack”) we want that update to be Tweeted to Twitter. We needed a service that periodically checks the RSS feed for us and does the Tweeting without us having to worry.

We released an app update a few weeks ago. The biggest update of the update went into the iOS version, but Android saw some stuff, too.