hobolog :: Web Development

This is a simple presentation of events on a map, with a fun spotlight effect for highlighting a particular event. Geo Mashup needed some significant work to associate a date with a post location – a feature that will now be included in the next release.

The No Impact Project promotes a new book and movie about a family that went to extremes for a year to reduce their environmental impact. I like the movie clip under “see it” – my guess is that most of us will identify with Mom’s experience.

I’ve written a small web application for viewing Flickr photos in a specified order: Ordr.

The main motivation is to provide a way to view Group pool photos in order by date taken. On my recent hike in Wyoming there were many good photographers taking pictures, all of them Flickr users. A Flickr group is a great way to collect all those pictures in one place, but you can’t view them in the order they were taken, so there’s no story. Ordr makes a group based on an event much more useful.

Flickr can and should implement these features, but until they do, this is a workaround.

I’m sharing this application, but having written it in my free time, it’s only lightly tested. If you use it and find a problem, please let me know.

The free libraries phpFlickr, jQuery, and Galleriffic are used and greatly appreciated.

This site houses a database of academic centers, businesses, foundations and non-profit organizations engaged in global development. Each member can list all the countries they are active in around the world. The former site had no map interface to this extensive data. The focus on country data lead me to choose the Google Visualization API Geomap rather than my Geo Mashup plugin for the interface. The result is a near perfect way to present their members’ global influence and query the directory.

In addition to the maps, I implemented the member submission and editing forms. I considered using a plugin like TDO Mini Forms, but in the end I needed more fine control than the plugins offered, and wrote the forms as WordPress templates. This allowed me to do things like generate checkbox collections from the category tree.

Release 1.2.6 is a collection of small fixes issues including some leftover strange category line behavior, the disappearance of tabs on the option page in WordPress 2.8, some wrong icons in the visible post list (issue 226), and future post info windows (issue 213).

Release 1.3alpha1 is a preview of some 1.3 features – see the brief documentation for more.

Remember there’s a solution now for protecting your custom files from automatic upgrades. See the upgrade considerations before upgrading Geo Mashup automatically. Of course the usual methods are fine too.

I’m going to be away during July, and not available for hire until August!

Yesterday a bug in the Google maps API caused Geo Mashup global maps to be spattered with unwanted category lines (Issue 208). This release fixes that, and a couple of minor problems with the tabbed category index and list posts by area controls.

I have a solution now for protecting your custom files from automatic upgrades. See the upgrade considerations before upgrading Geo Mashup automatically. Of course the usual methods are fine too.

Teamed up with Vernal Creative again, we put Geo Mashup to work mapping and listing the theaters that belong to this organization. The presentation is simple and effective, but it also exemplifies the way Geo Mashup makes WordPress into a GeoCMS. The map is really a map of WordPress pages, but in this context a located page is a theater. WordPress gives you posts and pages, Geo Mashup locates them for you, and you give them meaning for yourself and your audience.

Soon, Geo Mashup will locate users and comments for you also…

Fixes some problems saving locations (Issue 194) and a rare “duplicate entry” WordPress database error. Upgrade as usual.

I worked with visionsmith.com to use Geo Mashup to manage the geo content of this team of skiing, skydiving, BASE-jumping, paragliding maniacs. This site makes especially good use of Geo Mashup’s full post display and tabbed category index to create a highly interactive map for exploring the content of the site.

This site by Vernal Creative has worldwide projects organized into categories and subcategories. The challenge was to display these in tabs based on category, then post listings based on subcategory, where the post listing link would open its marker on the map. Our success gave Geo Mashup a cool new control, the tabbed category index, capable of many configurations in addition to the original at RSF.

A couple more small bug fixes for Geo Mashup, for sticky posts showing up in all info windows, and percentage widths not being allowed in saved settings. Upgrade as usual.