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Dan Karran

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Photography in the world of Web 2.0

In a world where it has become utterly painless to share photos with the world, it has been difficult to justify suffering the time-consuming process of manually processing images, uploading them and then adding them into a database to be proudly presented in the place I've been sharing my photos since 2000.

The photography section of my site started first with just a few of my favourite photos but quickly expanded into a fully fledged, custom-built, gallery system where I could share all of the photos I was taking using both film and - increasingly over the years - digital formats. Putting them into a database allowed more flexibility than hard coding them into pages and simplified the process of sharing them. Unfortunately, I never spent enough time developing the admin interface that runs it all, so it doesn't do anywhere near as much as it could to help me out.

Then, just over a year ago, I tried a photo sharing community out of curiosity. It was getting some great reviews and the community was growing pretty quickly. My usage of Flickr was patchy at first as I experimented and didn't fully see what all the fuss was about. Soon winter started to fade into to spring and I started taking more photos. Tagging the photos with relevant topics and sharing them with groups of like-minded people, strangers started to come in to my corner of Flickr and leave comments as they flicked through my photo book. I was hooked.

Since that point I've added very few new photos to the hundreds on this site, and instead have added over 1,000 photos to my Flickr photo stream.

Hopefully before too long I'll start to pull some of those back into this site, but I'll have to make a decision of either updating my site to talk to Flickr and pull in some photos that way, or completely redesigning the way the galleries work. If I do the latter I'll almost certainly use the Drupal system as a framework to build the new site on top of. That would give me the ability to let people comment on photos, subscribe to latest updates and all sorts of good stuff. Then I'd just need to add the ability to pull in selected photosets from my Flickr account, and I'm set.

Posted in , at 10:48 PM on Sunday 26 February 2006 | Comments (1)
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Searching by location in Drupal

There have been great improvements to search in Drupal 4.7 including the ability to extend it to search content from different modules. What I'd like to do is incorporate location into the search (instead of being a separate tab as it presently is using the location.module), allowing people to type their search text, choose which node types they'd like to search and then type in the name of a place (eg a city) they'd like to search near to.

To simplify the input, the new AJAX autocomplete functionality could be used to suggest places based on the name you're typing in. The co-ordinates of this place could then be used to filter the nodes that were returned from the search and allow for the ordering of search results by distance if desired.

I'm conscious that a search screen should be as simple as possible, but think this would be a useful addition for people who wanted to search for things by location. Perhaps allowing people to type '[searchstring] near Stuttgart, Germany' would be a better way of allowing location based searching. The autocomplete could still be used for that as well, by autocompleting only the bits after a 'near' statement.

Any input from the community is welcome, including thoughts on the interface and on how the back end hooks in the search system may best be put into place.

Posted in at 7:18 PM on Thursday 23 February 2006 | Comments (0)
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Terminal 5

Terminal 5Whilst travelling back through London last week, I noticed this new sign showing the extension of the London Underground Piccadilly Line that will take passengers to the new Heathrow Terminal 5 that is being built.

The only thing is, it's really confusing. If you were to look at that, how would you expect to get from the city to Terminal 5, considering trains appear to go straight from Terminal 4 to Terminals 1,2,3, bypassing T5 completely. If that's not going to confuse bewildered tourists, I don't know what will.

Posted in , at 5:11 PM on Wednesday 22 February 2006 | Comments (0)
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Mein erster Deutsch Abendkurs

Tonight I took my first German evening course, though I have a feeling that I may have picked a level that's slightly higher than I'm comfortable with. That could be a good thing, in that it'll push me further - afterall, sometimes it's better to jump in at the deep end - but I think I'll sit in on the next level down and see how much more comfortable I feel with that one before I make the final choice of which to pursue.

I've not learnt any German since I was in high school, except picking up odd little bits here and there, whilst travelling or trying to understand information on the internet. The past few months have helped as well, but I haven't really spoken properly to enough German speaking people yet to have learned very many new words and phrases. Moving closer into the centre of town will help with that, as hopefully I'll have a better chance of going out and meeting more people.

Posted in at 8:58 PM on Tuesday 14 February 2006 | Comments (3)
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Location-based functionality within Drupal

Having laid out last week some of the overall location-related functionality I'd like to see within Drupal, I wanted to start a proper list of areas around which I would like to see development within the Drupal community. I'll be putting effort into creating and improving many of these, and hopefully working with others who want to help as well.

I've broken down the functionality into three sections of the data flow - incoming data, internal processing and display, outgoing data and external systems. Please feel free to leave comments on which bits you'd like to see sooner rather than later, and any extra functionality that I've missed off the list.

  • Incoming data
    1. Ability to tag individual nodes in system with location information
      • by address (functionality already exists)
      • by clicking map
      • by coordinates
    2. Ability to extract location information from EXIF tags in jpg images
    3. Ability to automatically extract location of items from incoming feeds
      • from RSS feeds (using the geo namespace or GeoRSS implementation)
      • from KML feeds?
      • from GML feeds?
  • Internal processing and display
    1. Ability to search near location
      • by address (currently can search near zipcodes only)
      • by city/country
      • by clicking on map (or entering coordinates)
    2. Listing of similaraly tagged nodes nearby
    3. Mapping
      • Simple visualisation
      • Mapping nodes on top of imagery
        • Google Maps
        • Yahoo Maps
        • Maps from a GIS (eg MapServer)
      • GIS functionality
        • Point in polygon analysis (for example, to find which region a point lies in - useful for determining which country a pair of coordinates lies in, or which administrative district a point lies in)
      • Community map creation
      • Map of nodes with ability to filter by users, buddies, location, etc
  • Outgoing data
    1. Export any Drupal page as a feed (or layer) - e.g. search terms, tags, node types etc
      • RSS feeds with location imformation embedded
      • KML feeds
      • GML layers (using WFS from OGC to allow data output capabilities to be determined)
    2. Ability to filter by geographic location, user, content type etc
    3. Ability to export single points
      • links to maps (functionality already exists)
      • link to Google Earth placemark (complete)
  • External systems
    1. Creation of a geocoding system that can be accessed and queried by other systems (including Drupal) through a RESTful style XML interface - similar to Mikel Maron's geocoder

updated 16th February 2006

Posted in , , at 2:02 PM on Tuesday 14 February 2006 | Comments (3)
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Cross country skiing and the aftereffects

Despite the tiredness which had ensued from a mixture of jetlag and a lack of sleep on Tuesday (after chatting to other Drupalers and drinking open source beer until the early hours of the morning) I couldn't resist going skiing with everyone on Wednesday night. being tired, I didn't want to risk downhill skiing and thought (rather foolishly) that cross country skiing would be an interesting and easier way out.

I skied a few times when I was younger but hadn't been on the piste for about eight or nine years since then, and I figured that corss country would be an easier version of the downhill skiing I'd done in the past. I was told that cross country skis are different in that they don't really have edges, though I didn't quite understand what they meant until I stepped into my skis and then promptly fell over. A few wobbles and near-falls later, I was on my way, with able guides to help me and tell me the way I should be doing it.

It didn't take too long to get going at a relative pace (at times), and it took a suprisingly long amount of time for me to fall flat on my face when I went out of control on a downhill section. Luckily it only happened once, and didn't hurt too much. By the end of it all, I was shattered but had a great time, and wasn't aching at all.

The next morning I woke up feeling refreshed and raring to go to the first session of the day. A session or two later I'd started to seize up and ache rather a lot, and it's not got any better since. Ah well, a few days of aching for a fun night of skiing sounds like a fair trade off, right?

Posted in at 8:48 PM on Friday 10 February 2006 | Comments (0)
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After the OSCMS summit

The OSCMS summit is now over, but it's been a great week, packed full of information and activities. I've met a number of the other people interested in using Drupal for location-enabled activities, from simply tagging of content with a geographic location, to mapping those locations (and others) and actually implementing more GIS-like functionality.

One of the things I really want to see happen (and will certainly be helping with) is making sure that we are complying to standards of geographic data sharing so that information from outside the Drupal framework can be pulled into Drupal, and information can similarly be pushed out and used by other systems - from Drupal sites (through GeoRSS feeds - or the other GeoRSS standard being proposed), to Google Earth (using KML) and also systems capable of reading in OGC-compliant feeds (probably implementing a WFS interface).

Improving the usability and functionality of inputting geographic information is also high on my priority list, trying to get away from the largely US-centric input that is present at the moment. Of course, that's not easy when the availability of reliable and open geographic data is scarce outside of the USA.

I'll be keeping track on here of the bits I'm working on - and others are working on - here in my blog over time.

Posted in , , at 8:05 PM on Friday 10 February 2006 | Comments (1)
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OSCMS Summit

I'm lucky enough to be flying out tomorrow to go to the OSCMS Summit (that's Open Source Content Management Systems) which is being held in Vancouver this week.

The summit will be my first chance to meet some of the large community of open source developers that support the Drupal project that much of the work I'm currently doing is based on.

I'm particularly interested in the location aspects, how it can be improved and what new functionality can be implemented to improve the spatial awareness of sites run using Drupal. It's great to see such a large crowd of people have signed up for the geodata workshop on Wednesday so it ought to be a great opportunity to meet others interested in the same area and work together on producing some great new features.

Posted in , , at 9:56 PM on Sunday 5 February 2006 | Comments (0)
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A little facelift

I've given the blog a little bit of a facelift today. I've wanted to do it for a while and never quite got around to doing it. Hopefully now it is a slightly cleaner interface, and the text isn't so small that it's difficult to read. There are still a few tweaks I need to make, but on the whole I'm happy with the new look for it.

Any comments greatly appreciated.

Posted in at 7:47 PM on Sunday 5 February 2006 | Comments (2)
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