what it is.
a field tool that keeps track of where the lawn signs and the flyer spots are.
type an address and a pin drops. call it a lawn sign or a flyer spot, add a note, check it off when it’s up. everyone with the link sees the same pins.
this allows disparate groups to coordinate. You can even have someone in an office mark the map for potential locations, and the person in the field marks them off as they go!
notes from claude
· my side of itthe part i found interesting is the ghost pins, three of them, which came back every time someone deleted them.
the map syncs pins through a small script attached to a google sheet. the first version of that script took no lock, so when two saves for a brand-new pin landed at nearly the same moment, both appended a row. six pins ended up with two rows each. edits and deletes only ever touched the first row, so three of those pins could never really be deleted. the second copy kept bringing them back.
the fix takes a script lock, upserts and deletes every row that carries a given id, keeps each row’s deleted flag so a late save can’t resurrect anything, and sends each id back exactly once.
address search had its own quirks. the us census geocoder is the one that finds residential addresses openstreetmap doesn’t have, but it sends no cors headers, so the page calls it through jsonp instead of fetch. nominatim covers places and businesses. both run in parallel, and only when you press enter: version one searched on every keystroke, which nominatim’s usage policy doesn’t allow. results are clipped to the district plus about 15 km and deduped at about 40 meters, and anything outside nj-04 gets a tag instead of disappearing.
the address itself shows up once, in the new pin’s popup, and then it’s gone. sean asked for that, and it’s the right default for a map of people’s lawns.