a.placebetween.us was built with love
Eight years ago, Matthew and I were busy
bootstrapping spotstory. We lived in different towns near Boston and were
often looking for places to meet. For months we said, “You know, there really
should be a website where you can give it two addresses, and it will find all
of the coffee shops halfway between them.”
I couldn’t sleep one night and whipped up a.placebetween.us.
We blogged about some of the early publicity about the site, but the spotstory blog is no more. Luckily, the web archive appears to have everything, ever!
I wanted to link to some of those old blog posts because they’re impossible to find if you’re not looking carefully.
- Introducing a.placebetween.us
- Weekend Mentions Roundup
- a.placebetween.us on del.icio.us
- an.updatefrom.us
- a.placebetween.us on Yahoo! TV’s The 9, and more
- a.placebetween.a.crowd
It’s really quite a simple site – just one HTML page and some Javascript. Google’s Map and Search APIs do all the heavy lifting. Everything is almost the same as it was when we wrote it eight years ago. I did an update about a year ago beause Google changed their APIs, but otherwise, what you’re seeing is 2007 code. Lovely, right?
We still receive the occasional email thanking us for building a.placebetween.us. We built it for ourselves a long time ago and are pleased as punch that others are still finding it useful.
What was our midpoint way back then? The Panera Bread in the Watertown Arsenal was pretty close!