Category Archives: PlanningAlerts.org.au

Little OpenAustralia Hackfest, Big Results

Hackfesting

Cross-posted on the Official Google Australia Blog. A couple of weeks ago we at the OpenAustralia Foundation – Australia’s open data, open government and civic hacking charity – asked if anyone wanted to join three of our volunteers at Google Sydney for a hackfest. The request was deliberately casual as we just wanted have a [...]

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PlanningAlerts for my mum (and the Northern Territory)

My mum called me from Sydney Airport yesterday. She was stopping over from New Zealand on her way to Batchelor in the Northern Territory where her and her husband are moving. After I got off the phone to her I remembered that PlanningAlerts didn’t cover anywhere in the NT and I also remembered – what [...]

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OpenAustralia Hackfest – “What are you up to next weekend?” edition

Come and join Henare, Tim and Matthew in their basement, er.. we mean Google Sydney, for an awesome weekend of hacking. It’s all a bit last minute. What’s the worst that happens? Nobody turns up and the three of us spend the weekend hacking. That’s okay too. However, it would be much more fun if [...]

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PlanningAlerts closes the loop

Commenting on a PlanningAlert

Our built environment has a huge impact on our lives. And we all have strong opinions about what it should be like. One of the major things that determines this is the planning process that our councils look after. If you’ve ever tried to make a submission on a development application you will know that [...]

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Embedding PlanningAlerts in a map just got a whole lot nicer

We’ve a made a pretty small change to the way that applications from PlanningAlerts can get embedded in a map that makes it much easier to use. It’s easiest to see with an example: View Larger Map When you click on one of the points on a map, as well as the description of the [...]

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Wonderful new features for PlanningAlerts

planningalerts_tweet

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve added some wonderful new features to PlanningAlerts which are the start of something big. Until now, the focus of PlanningAlerts has been squarely and clearly about notifying you of new development applications in your area. That notification happens via email. We’ve added two new big features which allow [...]

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A new way of seeing

Today, we’re happy to announce a new way of seeing planning applications from PlanningAlerts.org.au for the iPhone 3GS and Android phones. It uses an augmented reality application called Layar to display recent planning applications in real time over a live image of what your phone is pointed at. To install follow this link on your [...]

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Browse local council websites for 15 minutes and make a big difference to PlanningAlerts.org.au

As you may know PlanningAlerts.org.au works by collecting development applications from many local council websites and republishes them in an easy to use way, notifying people of new applications in their area and in that way keeping you informed of things happening near you. To do this we need to know where those applications are. [...]

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Embed a PlanningAlerts Google Map in your blog

Inspired by Matthew Somerville’s post over at the mySociety blog about Embedding a FixMyStreet Google map in a blog, here’s how to embed a PlanningAlerts Google Map in your blog, like this one for Newtown, NSW: View Larger Map From the instructions on the API page, we can work out how to get an RSS [...]

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PlanningAlerts – going back to basics

Back in December of last year, we launched PlanningAlerts. It was a massive rush getting the site up and running. We had only seven weeks to build the site, including the scrapers, the bits of software that get all the planning data from the local council websites. We had applied to the Government 2.0 Taskforce [...]

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