[isf-wifidog] NYCwireless: Feedback & Questions

[Benoit Grégoire]

On July 28, 2005 03:11 pm, Rob Kelley wrote:
> Hi:
>
> I’ve been managing NYCwireless's deployment of WiFiDog.  First off,
> we love it.  We used one of our pilot ‘dogs in last night’s monthly meeting
> and gave people a run-through, including showing them on the list of users.
> The meeting gave us a chance to gather and consolidate feedback:
>
> 1. Though we love the real time monitoring of hotspots, you have to go to
> the site to see it.  How about sending notifications when a Hotspot goes
> offline.  It could be in the following intervals:
> A. First notice
> B. After five minutes
> C. After ten minutes
> D. After one hour
> E. Once a day

This is planned.  The way we plan to do this is to have a "tech_support" flag 
in the node_owner table and mail would be sent to that (these) person(s).  
Also we must not forget to send mail when the hotspot goes back up, so that 
the person doesn't have to double check.
 
I just opened a RFE: 
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1247029&group_id=102646&atid=632427

> 2.  How do you bypass the content management system completely?
> Some coffeeshop owners are going to have designs that will be too
> hard to implement using the current cms interface and default
> template. We'd like the ability to use custom html.

The current way to do this is to use the Langstring content type.  It will 
take the following html tags:
    const ALLOWED_HTML_TAGS = 
"<a><br><b><h1><h2><h3><h4><i><img><li><ol><p><strong><u><ul><li>";

Another option is to use the Iframe Content type which will allow you to grab 
a page from another server.

Beyond that, you will need to extend wifidog's feature set in one of two ways:

-Allow a super administrator to create a langstring with no tag striping.
-If you do not want ANY functionnality from the portal (user list, getting 
back to the url that wifidog intercepted, RSS, etc.), you could add support 
for a redirect URL tied to the node.  Wifidog would then redirect to that web 
page instead of the standard portal.

> 3. Some users connect with palms and pocketpcs and have trouble with
> the login page.  How hard would it be to present a simplified login
> page based on the users browser?

Not hard at all, but it would be better to fix the design so it degrades 
gracefully for these devices.  I don't think any of the current developers 
own one of these unfortunately.

> 4. It'd be nice to have a "quiet dog", where wifidog is still running but
> not asking people to login.  It could validate and track based on mac
> address. That way, operators get their stats, and users get quick entry. 
> Also, if we gather mac address(es) with registration, it’s a step toward
> remembering people based on mac.

That's 
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1229316&group_id=102646&atid=632427

It would require very little development to get going.  A little more work 
would have to be done to generate the stats based on MAC adress instead of 
users, but it's not that hard to do either.

> 5. How do you put non-wifidog hotspots in the database of known hotspots
> and get them to display on the map as grey ballons (not monitored)?

Set the node's deployement status to NON_WIFIDOG_NODE 

> Again, thanks a lot. We’re finding WifiDog to be a great piece of software
> and we’re looking forward to expanding our rollout once pilot is done!

Glad to hear that!
-- 
Benoit Grégoire, http://benoitg.coeus.ca/
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