Thursday 20 January 2011

End of the hiatus

Alas, the best part of December and most of January turned into a hiatus from blogging due to a combination of work commitments, Christmas and worrying about doing the Etape (stage of the Tour de France open to amateurs). The latter has led to many spinning classes, a new appreciation for dance music and a frustration with Virgin Active's timetable system, which makes it very difficult to find out where a class is on. e.g. it's relatively easy to find out the classes on at the Strand on Thursday, but what if I want to know where R.P.M. is on across all branches?

With this frustration in mind, I set about scraping all the timetable information for all days for all branches (the code to do this is here). I then chucked this into Tableau Public, with the aim of creating a small dashboard that would allow anyone to cut the data in a few ways (ideally on an iPhone...).

Below is the current prototype, which has all branches timetables as of 9pm last night. Version 2, coming shortly, will include a postcode function, allowing a user to input a postcode, find out what classes are nearby (as the crow flies...) and directions to the club (based on google maps).