Dear Food Truck Owners,

The data that gets put on my site is collected by your twitter feeds,@uchinomgo’s twitter feeds, google calendar feeds, emails, websites, etc. Some of it is collected automatically (via twitter parsing and reading your public calendars) and a lot of it is added by me sleuthing around on your websites.

I will be out of the country for a week with no access to internet (from March 22-29). During this time I will be tightening up how stops get placed on my site as to avoid bad data getting added. I could really use your help to assure that during this time truck stops get added correctly. Here are some things you could do to help me (also see this):

  • From March 22 – 29th, you need to use the hashtag #ftf whenever you specify a location on twitter otherwise your stop will not get added to my site or included in any of the tweets to my chiftf_ twitter accounts. So instead of this:

    We will be at Clark and Monroe for lunch today

    do this:

    We will be at Clark and Monroe for lunch today #ftf

    See, that was easy.

  • Try to avoid using two locations in one tweet, for example

    Sorry Adams and Wacker, we are at Clark and Monroe #ftf

    My site isn’t that smart and will pick the first location it finds, so it will put your stop at Adams and Wacker. Ordinarily I’ll spot a tweet like this and correct it on my site, but I’m not going to be here.

  • Try to use times. “11-1:30pm” or “until 3:00” or something like that. If you are a lunch truck and don’t specify times, I just assume you are going to be at a spot for two hours from 11:30 to 1:30 (ok it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the basic gist)

  • If you want to take all your stops off my site for a day, just use “off the road” in a tweet (currently, this sends me an email which validates that that is your actual intention before I click a button and have your stops removed, but during this week my site will just remove all of your stops)

  • I currently manually add your schedules I get in email or day-of on twitter. My site will not add your schedule stops for the day while I’m gone. If you want to post an advance schedule, use a public google calendar and send me the URL to it. Currently Flirty Cupcakes, Chicago Pizza Boss, Baby Cakes, and Cupcake Gangsters are the only trucks that do this.

Thanks again and let me know if you have any questions