after the storm

The increased traffic briefly brought our site to its knees. We’ve learned a few things, made some code changes, and are now happily almost at the 500 bathroom mark.

We’re in the process of moving to a more robust hosting system, which is very exciting, and we already have code  in the works to support international locations.

Shani Heckman, the director of Wrong Bathroom (several posts back) writes us to say that the film has been nominated for the best queer short film at Planet Out. If you have a free moment, you should vote, it would be great for this film to win, give the issue more exposure!
http://www.gay.com/entertainment/movies/posma/vote.html

fab write-up

annalee newitz wrote a lovely article about us, we’ve gained about 30 bathrooms over night 🙂

most of the safe2pee team really busy with non-web site projects at the moment, so you may have to hang in there for a week see new changes. I just moved yesterday and everything is still boxed up. Saying that, we’re upgrading our hosting— and this should give us the tools to add international support and clean up our code.

mashup of the day

I added us to programmable web (a dynamic list of mashups / apis / etc) and we were their mashup of the day!

You may have also noticed that recent images are now on the front page. That is all.

picture perfect

Hey there,

Getting the word out about our site is going well … we’ve been written up in Portland’s queer paper, Just Out! Yay Portland … again.

So, a couple of folks have suggested that we should make flyers, t-shirts, stickers and things like that, to promote the site itself and for the “liberating” of traditionally gendered bathrooms.

If you have any ideas or catchy phrases or designs please let us know. I put together the two flyers to promote the site below (basically inverted copies) , but then again I’m not really a graphics person, so if some of you out there want to share beautiful things with us we’d be happy to post them and give you tons of credit. I have screen-printing supplies and live in close proximity to thirft stores, but if anyone has mad-connections in the print or t-shirt making world we’d love to hear from you too 🙂

These are CC sharealike, so do anything you want with them. Hi-res, print quality versions are here (white background) and over here (black background). They should fit on a 8.5×11 piece of paper with room to spare.

Emi Koyama has some cool fuck your gender fliers for bathrooms (and elevators)! And PISSAR has some rad screened shirts:

P.S. Our email provider is having some trouble, so if you emailed us and no one has responded, either our response has not gone through or your email is still backed up in a queue!

browser testing

I found a neat QA utility over at BrowserCam and used their free trial to check out the site. The maps issue aside, it looks about the same (as it should) in most browsers. Thus far this is what i’ve found:

Everything now works on….

Firefox 1.5 – Windows, MacOS, Linux

Firefox 2.0 – Windows, Mac OS, Linux

Konqueror 3.4.0-5 – Linux

Safari 1.2 – Mac OS

Safari 2.0 – Mac OS

Issues with the Maps on:

Internet Explorer 6.0

Internet Explorer 7.0

Opera 8.5

Opera 9.0

minor update

hello,

we made a couple of minor changes including reversing the columns on the site and adding an explaination about the tag cloud. we’re working on a feedback/flagging system and continuing to look at options for enhancing the geocoding to work internationally.

There’s still an odd problem with google maps in internet explorer, but I think we’ve found the answer and it has to do with IE’s handling of javascript —- it’s more about where in the page you place code than the actual code, so that will hopefully be easy to resolve.

expect more serious updates friday.

—

on another note, we’re super excited that the project has taken off. we love all of the feedback that we are receiving, so please keep it coming; it helps us to move forward with the project and shape our future ideas.

there seem to be more and more sites online that are directed at queers, but so many are shallow attempts to capitalize on the queer (or as they would say, GLBT or ‘gay and lesbian’) market segment. We hope that our effort can inspire others to create resources to empower queers to organize and work together online and in their local communities.

bailey

p.s. we’ve also been written up on the Oregonian’s QPDX blog, yay portland!

press releaseish thing

San Francisco, CA

Friday January 26, 2007

For Immediate Release

GROUP LAUNCHES NATIONWIDE GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOM MASHUP

Several ambitious  genderqueers are working to create a “mashup” style gender neutral bathroom directory.

Fed up violence and harassment faced by gender variant people in public bathrooms, a group based in the San Francisco Bay Area (with contributors/members elsewhere), has launched a nationwide web directory known as safe2pee (safe2pee.org). Having been online for a little over two weeks, the site has received over 300 bathroom submissions in 70 cities.

The project features map plots of bathrooms, a tag cloud, information about accessibility and community features including the ability to comment and add pictures. At a time when similar projects have disappeared, safe2pee hopes to maintain a legacy by mirroring bathroom data elsewhere, and when stable, licensing their web site code as open-source. A project organizer, Bailey X, says that data is available under creative commons, and that the group encourages others to incorporate it into research and other projects. Ze says the project directs development based upon community feedback, “because it is the best way to serve the needs of those who use our site.”

The group, known as Safe2pee.org, promises more features, and resources, including a bathroom action guide and support for international locations, un the near future. They are open to dialogue, feedback and suggestions at info at safe2pee dot org

###

updates, or, lack there of.

No updates lately, I’ve been very short on time because of the San Francisco apartment search, which for those of you who have been a part of, know it’s not kind. You go to see a dive, and there are 20 other people there, all well-dressed, 10 years older with six figure salaries and SUVs. On top of that, if you’re lucky enough to be chosen, you have to round up around $3000 dollars to move in, and that’s just a one bedroom!

So that said, I think I’ve found a place, so life will be back to normal very, very soon. Expect new features and fixes to the existing features soon. The maps are having some issues in some versions of internet explorer; this is a problem we are looking into. We are still working on interational support — but it poses a more complex problem than first imagined and we’re going to have to replace the geo-coding parts of our code in order to do this. Have no fear, site users shouldn’t notice a thing, changes will be strictly on the backend and will probably improve our reliability!

Also, we’ve been Dugg. So if you’re one of those Digg people help us move up the ladder!

Wrong Bathroom Documentary

Here’s a short and amusing documentary on gender neutral bathrooms, enjoy! Created by shane star productions

welcome

Hello,

You may have seen our changlog … but we thought we might put it in blog form so it would be a bit easier to syndicate and follow. We’ve also started to compile resources which you can find on the resource page of this blog! A few more folks will hopefully be joining this project, so stay tuned for more posts and authors.

In case you’re new to the site, we’ve recently added the ability to upload images and are working on a whole host of new features. Expect more soon!