Dallas Halloween

Dungeon of Doom opens this weekend as well as Hangman’s House of Horrors and The Boneyard(Definately enjoyed that one). Lafitte’s Landing also opens this weekend.

I haven’t been to Hangman’s or Lafitte’s yet.

I went down to Houston to help my family weather Rita, which I am glad to say we had no trouble. Others did however, we were just lucky.

But you can read about that anywhere on the blogosphere or on the news media. How about some haunted houses?

Still adding more to the National Haunted House List.

But Houses are starting to open now.

These are open, to my knowledge:

• Dallas Scare Grounds
• Cutting Edge
• Thrillvania
• SlaughterHouse

You can read reviews about the Scare Grounds and the SlaughterHouse at Dfw Haunted Houses as soon as they get them up. I’ll have my own reviews once I get a chance to go, but that is a good site to get reviews and such.

VeggieMap is up using all the Haunted House Nation technology. Check it out, pretty cool, although mostly the same thing. Hoping to help people find vegetarian and vegan restaurants with this map. Only one so far, but more to come.

Hoping to get some more houses for HHN as well, but I’m in Houston right now waiting out Katrina, so it’ll be a bit.

Sorry about the downtime today, I’m in Houston helping my family prepare for Rita when there was some minor server problems. I was unable to fix them quickly since my internet connection is limited.

Ok, everything has been replaced by a main library. Duplicating the site will be easy, but I wanna knock off a few things before I move to that point, and add some more functionality. What did get done is centering the map view for a state level by moving it to the center of all the houses. Not the best method, but it does pretty good so I’m gonna leave it that way.

I’ve decided the rating system and comment system do not belong in the map class itself, so those are back on the shelf temporarily(want them up in a few days for sure though).

Search by open houses will be there, and RSS feed generation support will be there as well because the mapping system and the RSS system are so closely linked(and require almost the same data).

The comments/rating system will tie directly into the mapping library though, so when you click on a house some random comments will show up on the left(gonna move some of those adds off/down/around to make some room). Events support will be coming shortly too. I want it added into the main library so we can have haunted houses, but say, halloween concerts, or things like the Dragon’s Halloween Ball.

Stuff is coming. Very cool. =)

The map seems a lot faster now, and opens the info window if you click “Locate on Map” or select it from the site.

I’m changing the system to depend on a central library to make maintenance, changes, and upgrades more maintainable for haunted house nation. Right now it’s not many changes, just trying to replace the functionality it has with a central library. This will also allow me to replicate the site as I’ve mentioned I want to do.

Here’s my current feature list for this main library:

1. Custom RSS Feed of Opening Houses(Houses within 100mi of 75226 for example, or 200mi, etc..) so it can be replicated on blogs, etc…
2. Rankings, Vote for a house, 1 to 10. Averaging, etc.. will all be kept and recorded.
3. Ajax Support(will take longer, and come later). You don’t have to reload the site to do another search. This means it will work much more like Google Maps
4. Better centering support. Center the map to all the markers by creating some lat/long coordinates. Right now state view centers on a random house.
5. Search by Open Houses
6. Events Support - Things that are only happening once or for a given period. Such as concerts, etc.. stuff like that.

For this site itself(All that above will be able to be replicated so to speak):

The only thing I really care about at this time is direct linking to a house and after that the ability to hit driving directions from the state view of the map.

Here are the Houses that have opened this week in N. Texas:

• Cutting Edge
• Dallas Scare Grounds

As always, you can map it out on my other site Haunted House Nation.

Dragon’s Halloween Ball has been announced:

It’s on Oct 29th, 2005 at Club Seven. I’m not sure if I’ll make it or not this year though.

Ok, I’ve added a driving directions link(based on the zipcode you’re searching from). I’ve also set the default map to show Texas. As soon as we’ve got 50 or 75 haunted houses it’ll show the nation and a select number of houses(random) or all of them(if the poor browsers can take it).

Next up are direct links to the Haunted Houses. Possibly a better way to ask for Driving directions, and a way to do it from the State Listing(since most people will be coming in via that path, argh).

Direct links to hosues will look something like this:

http://www.hauntedhousenation.com/Thrillvania/5/

as soon as I figure out the best way to do it, and will be mostly for the Haunted House Owners to link back to this site(so their visitors can get driving directions, an interactive map, and be sure to hit a few houses all at once).

I just found this using Google’s new blog search. Awesome. =)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in 30 Seconds, Re-Enacted by Bunnies

Hat tip goes out to Here.

I’m so ready for some RH or RHPS action this Halloween. I wanna go see Los Bastardos. They’re doing a few shows for Halloween. Hell yeah! =)

Nothing like the story of Scientology for the Holidays!

Hey, we were mentioned over at the Steve The Bum Production Blog. Looking from what they’re up to, they’re making a documentary on Haunted Houses. You can keep up to date on their activities at their blog.

Steve The Bum Productions, from their website:

Steve The Bum Productions is Texas’ leading production studio with a penchant for
frightening subject matter and dark design. Our services range from Film and Video production,
Commercial Production and DVD Authoring to Web Design and Marketing/Public Relation Consulting.

Steve The Bum Productions offers a full range of Film, Commercial Video, Web design and Marketing and
PR services catering to the dark industries. STB was created to serve smaller- to medium- sized businesses
with micro to larger budgets. Our professional graphics designers, web designers, and film crew will work
close with your company to ensure that you get exactly what you want and need.

I’ve also added them to the links and the blogroll so everyone can keep up with them in the future.

There is a new RSS feed for recently listed haunted houses. You can subscribe to it Here. That is a direct link to the RSS feed, so you need to use an aggregator like Firefox or something similar. Enjoy!

I’ve added several(Thanks to people submitting them online) in Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and Portland. Keep them coming, the more the better.

Haunted Houses are always looking for new employees/volunteers. Here are a few of that are looking:

• Hangman’s House of Horror
• 13th St. Morgue
• Cutting Edge
• The Boneyard
• Dungeon of Doom
• Dallas Scare Grounds(Scroll to bottom of the page

If you end up volunteering I’d love to learn about your experiences and post them after the season! Contact Me and I’ll put a reminder to contact you after the season.

Ok, the search by radius is working, the zip codes are working(center to that zip code). I’m getting search by state going now. It’s working, but you have to edit the URL to get it to work properly. But hey, one step at a time.

Check it out at HauntedHouseNation.com and pass it around to your friends! We’ve only got one listing outside of DFW/North Texas(it’s in Alabama) and we need more! Feel free to add a site or tell a friend to add the site.

I’ll post more when I get a chance. Once I’ve got it up searching by state I’ll be mostly done. All that will be left is approving the haunted house listings(don’t want this to turn into spam central) and probably a driving directions link generator for Google Maps.

I also want to have a rating system for people to rate a House, and a system to leave comments/feedback, but that is more in the future. I wanna get the search by state up so I can call it stable and can focus on other features later.

I’ve been sick recently so work has been slow, but I got a boost this evening and added the search by radius and zip, so enjoy! Pass it around!