2008 blog archives

From the start of 2009 I am going to be self-employed, and while I will still be working much of my time on the projects I've been working on for the past three years at OpenBand/M.C. Dean, I would also like to start taking on some small Drupal-based projects to go side-by-side with that.

Some of the services I am planning to offer in the New Year include:

• Drupal site creation
  If you are looking to get a site set up for your small business or organisation, and you like the power that Drupal can give to your site, then I can set a site up for you to meet your needs. I'm particularly interested in creating sites based around geographic information or related to the tourism industry, but I will happily consider any project.
• Drupal site setup support
  If you need advice on how best to achieve your requirements with existing Drupal modules, I can help point you in the right direction and get you started with your Drupal site setup. This can either be on a remote basis, or on a face-to-face basis in the London area if needed.
• Drupal module development
  If there isn't already a module in the Drupal community to do what you need, I can help you by building a module to meet your requirements.

If you're interested in taking advantage of these freelance Drupal services for your project, please contact me to discuss your needs.

With the British pound getting closer and closer in value every day to the euro, it's hard not to consider what will happen when the currencies align. The Guardian comments on this 'psychological moment' in a piece a week ago, when the high street rates (after commission) gave less than one euro for your pound, when a year and a half ago, you would have got around half as much again for each pound.

"Sterling's decline to a value of less than a euro, after commission charges, is seen by economists and opposition politicians as a pivotal 'psychological moment' - and evidence of declining faith in the British economy on global currency markets."

It's not a given - and there will likely be a struggle before it happens - but there is a possibility that the United Kingdom could adopt the euro, and that time may not be too far off.

The thing I'm more curious about though, more than the situation in the UK, is the situation in the Isle of Man if the UK were to adopt the euro.

The Isle of Man has it's own currency - the Manx pound - that is linked in value to the British pound. Coins are similar in overall design characteristics, portray our head of state (Elizabeth II), and have a local design on the reverse. The currency can be spent on-Island but not off, while the British pound can also be used on-Island.

Before the euro was introduced into Europe, around ten years ago, the Isle of Man Government set up a working party to investigate the implications the euro would have on the Island. They published a report titled A Review of European Economic and Monetary Union and its Implications which stated (in part):

"The Isle of Man Government is presently planning to ensure that necessary preparations will be in place for the eventuality of a single currency, irrespective of whether the UK participates in monetary union in 1999.

[...]

If the UK joins monetary union and Sterling is replaced by the euro, the Isle of Man will retain the right to issue its own currency. The provisions of the Currency Act 1992 would allow the Island to issue a new Manx currency which would be a ‘substitute Euro’, similar to the ‘substitute Sterling’ currently issued. The Government has been active in its preparations for a new currency as the retention of the Island’s own currency through issue of the Manx euro has two significant advantages:

1. It provides a positive public statement of independence for the Island; and
2. It allows for the continuation of the accrual of investment income from the issue of Manx notes and coins.

While it will clearly be necessary for the technical specifications of notes and coins to be the same as other euro issues, the Island is preparing its own designs for Manx euro notes and coins."

So, the Isle of Man could adopt a Manx euro, similar to the current Manx pound, whether or not the UK adopted it. But what would the currency have have on it?

The Island is not part of the UK, nor part of the European Union (though it has certain ties to both). It has managed with the current psuedo Sterling currency since 1971, with very little confusion other than when people try to spend the money in the UK. With the euro, where each issuing country has their own designs on one side of their coins, having a Manx euro would create one more design on the equivalent of that 'national side' as well as a replacement 'common side' that differentiated it from 'real' euro coins. There's much more potential for confusion than with the British/Manx pound.

It would be interesting to get a glimpse of the designs that the Government were preparing a decade ago to see how they have retained the basics of the euro, highlighted that it is not a normal euro while also adding a Manx look to the currency.

How would you feel if the Isle of Man were to adopt the euro? Can you see it happening any time soon? What images would you like to see on the currency if it were to be introduced?

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Following on from my post yesterday about our company's sponsorship and presentations, I thought it was worth a post to highlight the sessions other people in the Drupal community have proposed that relate to the building of a geospatial web with the help of Drupal - the main reason I got involved in Drupal in the first place.

Jeff Miccolis (Development Seed) and Andrew Turner (High Earth Orbit) will present a session on Drupal and the Geospatial Web:

"This presentation will include an overview of the emerging Geospatial web, and the technologies, standards and communities that are driving it. We'll look at how Google Maps fall short and how to go beyond its basic approach to mapping on the web. We'll cover where Drupal fits in, ways to incorporate other mapping tools and data into your projects. Specifically, what modules extend Drupal, enable it to leverage existing tools and how to use these to do new and interesting things."

Jeff has been doing all sorts of interesting work recently with Drupal and RDF for storing geodata, and Andrew is the heavily involved in GeoCommons and Mapufacture, empowering users to share their geographic information.

Eric Gundersen (Development Seed) will be presenting a session titled Communicating Data Online: When Data Visualization and Workflow Matter:

"You have access to tons of information, Eric Gundersen of the online strategy shop Development Seed will talk about how interactive maps, data visualizations, and other online tools can quickly show you the bigger picture around large scale international issues. Eric will demo the new Pandemic Preparedness Mapping site built for InterAction to prevent the spread of a catastrophic disease like bird flu."

Eric, and Development Seed in general, have done a lot over recent years to build cool sites that are often centred around geospatial information. The Pandemic Preparedness Mapping site uses maps care of the Nice Map module and also a modified version of the KML module that allows people to access all the data in the site through Google Earth and many other systems that can read KML.

Rebecca White and other members of the Chicago Technology Cooperative will be presenting Drupal as a GeoCMS:

"This session will move from GIS concepts to Drupal GIS practice. We will talk about the principles of storing, organizing, and searching geodata, the practical usage of geodata in Drupal applications, and how geographic functionalities are implemented by existing Drupal modules."

Brandon Bergren, primary maintainer of the location module, GMap module and geo module will also be one of the presenters.

Frank Febbraro will be talking about Using Intelligent Web Services for Semantic Drupal Sites:

"Leveraging semantic web services such as Thompson Reuter's Calais within Drupal enables you to do amazing things that will be part of the semantic revolution. This session will cover some incredibly powerful things you can do to augment content and create powerful features once you have the semantic context and metadata of the information driving a site."

Another example of the intersection between the semantic web, Drupal and geospatial information, this talk will demo the Calais Geo service for geo-tagging and mashing up content.

Bevan Rudge will be using some of Drupal's geographic modules to build Google Maps Mashups In <10 minutes and a number of other presentations such as Karen Stevenson's CCK Mashup -- Oh The Things You Can Do! also relate to mapping.

There will no doubt be some BOF (birds of a feather) sessions around the growing area of geographic information in Drupal as well, but it already sounds like a great mix of presentations. If you're going, remember to vote for the sessions to make sure they all get the chance to present!

My employer, OpenBand, is going to be a Gold sponsor of DrupalCon DC in March 2009 and a number of our team members will be attending the conference.

We have a few presentations to give, and will be keen to see many of the other sessions that are going to be given.

In the Powering collaboration in a distributed enterprise session we'll be giving an overview of the work that we do, the collaboration platform we've been building (largely on Drupal) for our customers over the past three years or so, and some of the modules that we've contributed back to the Drupal community during that time.

Miglius Alaburda will be presenting a session titled Introducing a new File Framework about a new and powerful way of handling files in Drupal.

Alex Karshakevich will be giving a talk about Data Visualization in a Social Networking Context, taking advantage of some of the social networking capabilities of Drupal.

Darren Ferguson will be talking about Drupal with XMPP Integration and all the functionality that he has built up around the XMPP framework, allowing users of a Drupal site to use instant messaging capabilities.

It's also great to see some of our associates presenting about work which we've sponsored, like Audrey Foo's talk about how to Search private content between multiple drupal sites with Distributed search (and the related Add powerful features and improve performance of your drupal site with Apachesolr Search), Justin Miller's talk titled Beyond The Web: Drupal Meets The Desktop (And Mobile), as well as others in areas we're involved in like OpenID and RDF.

With all the sessions that have been proposed by attendees, this is shaping up to be a great conference!

Updated: Added Darren's XMPP talk

A little while back I was having a pint or two with my brother in a local pub when he spotted the offer of a promotional t-shirt for customers who were drinking the Fullers Discovery Blonde Beer. By the end of the night, they kindly gave us two of the t-shirts to take home (we got the impression they had quite a few left to give away).

The t-shirts had marketing for the Discovery beer on the front and, in the spirit of the name, also had a compass on the back with a pair of geographic coordinates within it. Recognising them as coordinates in the London area, I didn't think too much more about it, presuming they were the coordinates of the pub that was selling the beer, or of the Fullers Brewery that produced it, but it wasn't until the other day that I actually tapped the coordinates (51º29'15.24"N, 0º14'56.96"W) into Google Maps and - after switching to the satellite imagery view - discovered that this was all a part of the brewery's larger marketing strategy.

Presumably not too far off the flight path for Heathrow airport, and always under the attentive gaze of the electronic eyes in the sky, the Fuller's Brewery had used the prime marketing real estate of their roof to advertise themselves to the world. Of course this isn't a new strategy, with many other companies and organisations doing the same thing around airport areas for year, but the coordinated (excuse the pun) approach did strike me as a nice way to market their product.

Having said that, unlike in the early days in the web when, purely out of curiosity, I'd visit any URL I saw advertised, I don't think I'd do the same with a pair or coordinates that I saw on the back of someone's t-shirt...

Note: Aerial imagery copyright Google

When the usage statistics page for Drupal contributions was released recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see how many people were using the Availability Calendars module, and amazed at the difference the Drupal 6 release had on the usage figures. The graph below shows that the usage was quite steady on the Drupal 5 release, but when the version for Drupal 6 was released, it massively boosted the figures.

So, if you are the maintainer of a Drupal module or theme, and haven't yet released a Drupal 6 version, it looks like you're really missing out on potential users.

According to my drupal.org user profile, it's been three years now since I joined the Drupal community, and in that time I've been involved with building a large Drupal-based collaborative platform at work, helped friends create Drupal sites and developed a number of small Drupal sites in a freelance capacity, as well as contributing a number of modules back to the community, but had not managed to get around to actually migrating my own website to Drupal. Until today, that is.

Today marks the soft launch of my new Drupal website, an initial version that has most of the content from the old site but still needs some user interface improvements and the like.

The blog is up and running, now also with RSS feeds for each of the main categories and also each of the tags. The photos are all in there, though I'm missing any gallery functionality at the moment, so they're going to be a little difficult to find for now.

Watch out for more over the coming weeks and months as I find time to make improvements, expand what's here and tie in with other services on the web like Twitter, Flickr and delicious.

When I was looking for old maps of the Isle of Man a couple of years ago, I came across a great source of old maps of towns across Britain and Ireland (as well as a couple of the Isle of Man and other places in Europe). I didn't mention them in the post (I perhaps hadn't found them at that point) but I've recently had a bit of an interest in the history of the area around where I'm living, so went back to this supplier to order some old maps of the Elephant and Castle area of London.

Alan Godfrey has been building up an impressive collection of reprints of old Ordnance Survey Maps from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. The maps, collectively known as The Godfrey Edition, are reproductions of original maps, often scaled down slightly, but printed in extraordinary quality considering the age of the originals.

As described on their website:

Most of the maps are highly detailed, taken from the 1/2500 plans and reprinted at about 14 inches to the mile. They cover towns in great detail, showing individual houses, railway tracks, factories, churches, mills, canals, tramways and even minutiae such as dockside cranes, fountains, signal posts, pathways, sheds, wells, etc.. Each map includes historical notes on the area concerned. Many also include extracts from contemporary directories. The maps are neatly folded, often with an early photograph on the cover. The maps are ideal for local historians, transport historians, and family historians, or simply those with an interest in the town they live in or have visited. The maps are very good value and cost just £2.25 each.

Whenever I've bought maps from them (their whole catalog is online in their map shop) I've found them to be very responsive, with the maps often arriving the next day. Alan Godfrey was also open to the use of names from old maps for the OpenStreetMap project (where they were still relevant, as they often were in Peel in the Isle of Man, where much of the historical street layout still exists).

So, if you're interested in the history of the area around you, I highly recommend these maps as a great start to learning more about how things used to be.

I spent some time last year making some maps of the Snaefell Mountain Course (and other roads) on the Isle of Man so that I could add an overview map to the Wikipedia entry for the course.

Last night I was trying out some of the options in the OpenStreetMap 'export' tab, and since it can now export SVG (scalable vector graphics) files, I thought I'd have a try at redoing the maps from last year in a more re-usable and editable form using vector graphics instead of bitmaps.

To make the SVG map using data from OpenStreetMap (as shown in the preview), I just followed some relatively simple steps and a little trial and error while using the graphics editor.

I thought I'd share some of the steps below, in case anybody else was interested in making maps from the great data becoming available in the OpenStreetMap project.

So, what's needed to make your own custom maps?

1. An area of OpenStreetMap that's got enough information in it to be useful for your purpose.
   If the data you want is not all there, or you want to add more, see the beginners' guide and the map making guide to get you started off adding or improving data in the project.
2. An SVG image generated from OpenStreetMap using the export tab.
   To export your vector graphic file, zoom the main map into the area you want to export, click on the export tab, tweak the area you're interested in (if necessary), select 'Mapnik image' and 'SVG' from the options and click Export. Experiment with the scale to see what the results are, but initially the default scale will probably suffice.
3. A vector graphics editor such as Adobe Illustrator or, even better, an open source editor such as Inkscape.
   Open the downloaded SVG file in your editor and you should see a nice pretty OpenStreetMap image there. To start to work on it, it's a good idea to 'ungroup' the items so that you can edit them individually (I had to do this twice to fully separate out all the objects). You'll notice that the map is made up of many objects, one for each node and way you'd normally see rendered on the maps at openstreetmap.org. You'll also notice that text annotations (names, road references, etc.) are all broken down to their constituent characters too.
4. Some time to do some (at times quite fiddly) image editing and map making.
   You can get some results out in a relatively short timeframe, but you'll likely want to improve the map over time as you become more familiar with the data and tools available.

What steps were needed to create the TT map?

1. Select all the items and fade them (I lowered the level of transparency, but there are probably better ways of doing it).
2. Select the text items, group each the characters of each name together to make it easier to edit them, re-emphasise them, and change their size if desired.
3. Select any other items that should be re-emphasised and do that (I did the sea and the land).
4. Select each element of the subject that you'd like to highlight (for me, this was each way that makes up the course) and change the styling of it (I increased the size, and re-emphasised the original colours). I also combined them all into a single 'path' and joined the end of each one to the end of the next (using the 'Edit paths by nodes' ad 'Join selected end nodes' tools) to make it fill in the gaps that appear between them.

Hopefully this short tutorial (well, documentation of my first steps) was helpful for other budding neo-cartographers out there. If you've made your own maps from OpenStreetMap data and have any hints and tips that may be useful, please feel free to add a comment to this post.

The KML module for Drupal allows you to view location-enabled data from your site inside of Google Earth, and it's now available for Drupal 6 - the latest release of the Drupal content management platform.

Having realised last week that the Location module for Drupal was already working pretty well on Drupal 6 I set about to update the KML module to start working with it.

It had been a while since I'd done much with the module, and have thankfully had some help from another community member - Robin Rainton, or raintonr - who was keen to add some new features, so it was great to get stuck back into it and try out some of the new things that Robin had added since I last touched the module. Perhaps the biggest new features are the caching of KML feeds so whenever you're accessing them in Google Earth you put less of a strain on your Drupal site (especially if you are using Network Links to regularly update the feed), and the ability to choose the style of the markers instead of using the default pins that we used to have.

So, if you want to use the KML module on your Drupal 6 site, you can now do that. You'll need to download the latest version of Location module and also the latest version of KML module. There will likely still be issues with this early version, so please let me know if you come across any by posting them in the issue queue on drupal.org.

Note: The icon depicted above is a combination of elements from the Druplicon (licensed under the GPL) and the Google Earth icon (used without permission). Hopefully it's not breaching Google's trademark or copyrights or anything...