Thank you very much for the feedback. I knew I was getting in trouble by not using the ST functions! ;)

In this case the min is required because the query usually finds two records with the same route and description, but traveling in different directions. Since we aren’t grouping by the_geom, it needs to go into an aggregate. In this case I only want the closest route, so min is the way to go.

That is good to know about shp2pgsql. I generally use the command line tools, but I’m working on a qgis post and wanted to use spit.

Thanks!
Edwin

Quick note for future maintainability. Don’t use PointFromText, distance etc. Those have been removed in PostGIS 2.0. In fact I would stay away from any PointFromText variant as that is slower than the more generic ST_GeomFromText because it does type checking.
Also why you have that MIN in there is beyond me. I’m assuming that’s a mistake.

So your code would look like:


SELECT "RTE" as route, "RTE_DESC" as description,ST_distance(ST_GeomFromText('POINT(-122.613639 45.499541)', 4326), the_geom) as distance
from tm_routes group by route, description
order by distance limit 10;

Did you use SPIT to import this file in? shp2pgsql that comes packaged with PostGIS automatically lower cases the column names unless overwritten, so you shouldn’t have this problem.

Those units would be decimal degrees. Not the most useful unit for walking directions ;)

You can get the distance in meters if you use the distance_sphere method rather than distance. The results are supposed to be a little slower and less accurate. I’m not worrying about speed or spatial indexes, yet.

Here is what the query would look like with distance_sphere:

SELECT “RTE” as route,”RTE_DESC” as description,”DIR_DESC” as direction,
distance_sphere(PointFromText(‘POINT(-122.613639 45.499541)’, 4326), the_geom) as distance
from tm_routes order by distance limit 10;

There are a few aspects I’m still struggling with, hoping you may have elegant ideas.
1. What about upgrades? Suppose I had sprite.png with all sorts of sprites, and now I want to change it. There’s a race between collectstatic and the actual code update, where people might get the new png but with the old sprite coordinates. In the case of code-ish statics (js/css), it could be even worse. Any idea about solving that?

2. Also, what do you do in development? Add the static serving code from contrib.staticfiles to urls.py and let gunicorn serve it?

3. And finally, what about statics like favicon.ico or robots.txt? Where would you put those and how would you handle the URL redirection?

Cheers!

That is a great point! Honestly it would be better to override the STATIC_URL setting in a local settings.py. I meant to include a snippet to do that. Since the developer server handles static files you could have:
STATIC_URL = ‘/static/’

in your settings_local.py and include that in your global settings.py with something like:
from settings_local import *