Archive for the ‘plotMe’ Category

Sunday this week was very successful on the web-development front as it involved the very successful completion of a long running project and the chance to drink some nice coffee with my friend! Although not quite polished to absolute perfection yet, my ATP (Adventure, Travel and Photography) theme/plugin for wordpress is pretty much complete. The area that needed my attention was the photo display part. To give you some background, here was my own design brief;

1. Front page to show a dynamic map of some sort that plots the positions of the articles.
2. Small excerpts with a thumbnail image of each entry.
3. A self generating menu that cross references location and activities.
4. A random image of only my travel photos.
5. Each article was to have an album of photos displayed within it that would create a neat pop-up viewer, rather than link to my gallery.
6. The design had to be ‘compatible’ with my existing website.

After about 3 months of coding and tweaking, I had everything working. The only aspect I was not 100% happy with was the implementation of the photos. I was using an application that involved loading the photos into the post itself and from there, would create a pop-up viewer and could even generate the random image I was after. What concerned me was that if I wanted the photos in my main gallery, they would be duplicated there. What I needed was a way of pulling in my gallery photos and a new way of viewing them. This was solved by actually writing a plugin that would pull the images from the gallery album and display them. A new seperate pop-up viewer was needed so that a clean-popup window could show the images with a navigation system to browse through the pictures.

I had spent all of Sunday morning creating these parts and was working on the viewer when Gringod showed up. Fueled by proper Italian coffee, we polished off the pop-up viewer and even found the time to include some Javascript that would dynamically resize the window to the photo contained within. Now the system is complete, I have added one story about when I went shark diving in South Africa. To see how the system works, browse over to http://adventure.phrixus.co.uk. As I am leaving for my holiday on Saturday, expect it to start growing soon. For major updates I will post on this part of the site but the main stories will be found there.

For anyone that is interested, Gringod and I have finally uploaded the new Aquasail.net homepage. This will allow you to see each of the loactions that the yacht Spinalonga has been to and will link to the relevant article. Have a look and see what you think. The map system is also being heavily used in a project that I am working on at the moment to ducument location photography and travel articles.

Dave will very soon have a presence online as we are building him a photoblog. Links and details to follow over the next few days. If anyone has any ideas for sub-domain names for him… let me know! We hope this will make him use his camera little more and get used to posting online!

Just to make my php plotting software look rubbish, Google Maps can show you some pretty impressive sattelite imagery of your home. If you are interested in seeing where I live have a look here. Guernsey is the small island in the upper right in the centre of the screen. It would be good if they continue to add imagery for the European area that I live in. You can see to street level in some areas of the US that I checked!!

I am truly astounded… no, I am in awe and cannot help but be absolutely amazed and grateful for the service that I have just received from GPS4Less.co.uk. Yesterday afternoon at about 4 o’clock, I ordered a Garmin handheld GPS unit. It arrived this morning (Next Day) at 10.30!! How did this happen? If I had been partying at some stage in the week, I would seriously question if I had ordered it much earlier… babbling and speechless so off to play…. thanks GPS4Less.co.uk.

I have decided to call my code plotMe for the time being as it seems a lot more generic and unmarketed as the names I was coming up with previously. I have also added a new category to my Blog!

More progress now. On this version you can click a location and the place you click becomes the location of the spot. Now that I have this functionality it should be fairly easy to get some more dynamic information passed to my code. I think a little tidying up is needed and I need to clean up the maths so that I can use real location figures. That will be one of many steps involved in furthering this project! I need to come up with a new name aswell… any ideas??

Okay so I have been researching and learning about the PHP GD library. I have managed to make a start on my mapping system with a lot of help from various sources on the net and my trusty PHP book. If you are interested in my prototype system have a look here… comments welcome! I have dubbed it GeoCODE but that will need to be reviewed in the future when I get some inspiration!