Archive for February, 2007

Camp Hill Clump PhotoSpots

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

As a slight variation this time, this is actually a group of three Panoramic Images, all taken quite close together…

Open in Google Earth:

  1. Inside the Trees (341kb)
  2. The Trigpoint (276kb) - you expected that right :)
  3. Down the Path (489kb)

This set presented a special challenge in locating the photos, because as well as absolute accuracy in placing the set (thanks to the trigpoint!), also needed to get the relative positions correct – in step some Getmapping imagery.

geotagged More Links for this location

KML (& NetworkLink) for Nearby & any Geo-WordPress!

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

Following the addition of GeoRSS, earlier today while out photographing some PhotoSpots (TBA), I had an even better (possibly) idea, now that my WordPress stores Lat/Long, why not output KML too! The icing on the cake is you can also wrap it in a NetworkLink so that peoples Google Earth will auto update. (I am surprised couldn’t find this done already!)

And if that isn’t enough then I also release the code under GPL :) – note its the first time written anything for WordPress, so might not be a tidy as could be!

Anyway see it in action on my series of PhotoSpots:

- as all these list the PhotoSpot category, each post includes a link to open the actual spot, so just click the world icon in the balloon to open :)

Download the Source or view the source: WordPress KML Generator and NetworkLink Wrapper

Installation: This is not a proper plugin, so just drop the .php files into the root of your WordPress folder and you should be done (but you can configure the icon to display if you wish by editing the wp-kml.php file)

Use: Normally you would only provide a link to the Wrapper – which in turn links to the feed itself, but the feed is useful like in the above example to plot directly on Google Maps. You can also specify a particular category to display like the above example or otherwise will include all geocoded posts.
Important: Requires the GeoPress extension be installed (to get geocode info)
Only tested on WordPress 2.0.1 – Works For Me – Your Mileage May Vary – no guarantee, implied or otherwise

GeoRSS for nearby blog!

Saturday, February 17th, 2007

In one of those duh! moments, I suddenly realised the ironicness of the nearby blog not being GeoRSS enabled.

So now thanks to the wonderfully simple but powerful GeoPress WordPress extension, feeds are now GeoRSS talking, however this has only really been of any use (which probably why not done before) on the recent PhotoSpot mini series where the blog post is tied to a location!

It also allows a minimap to be embeded into the post, I’m not so sure on benefit of that in my case so have put one in the last post to see how it looks…

Also taken the opportunity to install Akismet plugin to help trap spam, I have my own very simple capatcha that means I only get about 4-5 a week anyway.

Update: also found you can get a (Geo)RSS feed of a particular category, so can could subscribe to the photospot series.

Geograph Hectads in Google Earth v2

Tuesday, February 6th, 2007

Sometime last year I created a visualization of Geograph coverage as a series of 3D columns in Google Earth, well as that is now out of date, time to create updated versions:

: Geograph Points Per Hectad (*)
and Images Submitted Per Hectad (each around 200kb)

These are spectacular in themselves, but if you then create a series of these each timestamped with the dates of the images included, you can get an interactive animation…

So here is a version that downloads a monthly bargraph, since the project began, allowing full animation using the timeslider. Due to the size will only give the Animated Images Version which is the best anyway.

(due to the way of loading the data with nested network links will take time and patience with the timeslider to load them, all it seems to only really be possible by manually dragging the time-slider slowly across the timespan. )

Just need someone to create a fly though preview and upload to YouTube ;)

(* Hectad is a Geograph term for a 10km by 10km square)