Anyway, we are now hosted on CatN‘s vCluster platform.
CatN is by the same people who provide colocation hosting for Geograph, so the move isn’t actually far (both Geographically, and Virtually .

Separating Channel Islands site into a more standalone project, should hopefully also make the site easier to manage – and give more flexibility to grow.

(Next project is moving Geograph Portals to vCluster too, but I’m going to have do some more work on the code first)

Unfortunatly the WMS doesnt play nicely in Google Earth for some reason, so here is a hand tuned Google Earth layer to display the 1:50 000 scale Geological Maps:

http://gokml.net/2sc.kml

Enjoy!

Now we have always been more that happy to produce and give out bulk dumps on demand to anyone who asks, we provide a live API, and even bittorrent based downloads of the images themselves (although admittedly they are a bit behind schedule!).

So in an effort to make it even quicker to get going on new ideas, we have began to put together a self service bulk data download site. So from the following page you can access MySQL dumps of the whole image database, as well as supplementary data such as extracted terms and words – ideal for making search engines and mashups, of course includes the full geographical locational data of the images.

data.geograph.org.uk/dumps

The only caveat is the data doesn’t include enough info to build a link to the image file on our servers. We are doing this because we don’t want to make it easy for people to spider large quantities of images, however contact us and we will see what we can do… we are normally happy to allow hotlinking of thumbnail images as long as we know about it.

This is only the beginning so let us know about your suggestions!

Re 1. Isn’t that what “Elastic IP“s do? – “Virtual IP”s that you can map to which ever instance you like.

Gmail – Hide Selected Label

Which removes the REALLY annoying redundant tag from when viewing all results from a tag. This has been enough to keep me on the ‘Older Version’ of Google Mail.

Works great in Firefox, now to figure out how to get it working in Chrome (uses as yet unsupported features).

I can’t keep quiet about this any longer, its getting me more and more annoyed. Google Maps includes a “Link” function – which creates a link to the current map, which is very useful – particully as the map is estentially ‘ajax’ style, but the parameters are definitly starting to suffer rot and lack of ‘love’ in maintaining them.

For example to just display a simple KML file, you get this corker:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.geograph.org.uk%2Ffeed%2Frecent.kml&g=Any+Street,+London,+UK&ie=UTF8&ll=55.053203,-3.208008&spn=17.762194,33.793945&z=5

There are so many things wrong with this url, its unreal. The first is the source – doesnt do
anything as far as I can see, an empty (but immensely useful) geocode, etc; but somewhat ironically I have HAD to edit the url provided by the function before I was willing to post it here, see that g param – yes that’s my (now made up!) home address.

Yes thats right, if you not careful Google Maps might get you to inadvertently share your home address – seriouslly WTF!

Ok, now I made my point will add a bit of background. It turns out the g param is the previouslly run ‘local search’, it would seem as it could provide extra context to the search*. But if you havent yet made a search – ie you sharing you first search – then its your starting location. And lets face it a fair number of people surely put their home/work etc location as the default location.

* consider this url:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=pizza&sll=51.500152,-0.126236&sspn=0.625781,1.235962&g=London&ie=UTF8&z=9

I searched for London (place) and then pizza (what), as two actions, but because the map was already loaded for london on the search, I didnt bother entering london again (which is a reasonably intutive thing to do) – and just ‘pizza’ in the query would have a harder time recreating the map. (although in this case the coordinates do the same job)

Ok you could ask why do I care, but the simple fact is I read URLs – they give a serious clue to what the page is, but with lots of clutter that is much harder…

(and for what ever reason I share a lot of Google Links, and about 90% of the times I have to edit them manually to get what I want)

btw, the link above could be recreated as

http://maps.google.com/?q=http://www.geograph.org.uk/feed/recent.kml&ll=55.053203,-3.208008&spn=17.762194,33.793945&z=5&hl=en

with NO loss, and if *I* was sharing the link would reduce it to

http://maps.google.com/?q=http://www.geograph.org.uk/feed/recent.kml&ll=55.0,-3.2&z=5

which does pretty much what I want (but admit that sort of reduction would be risky done automatically – so prefer it just stopped at the previous step)

(via)

Some things from Google (mainly Geo) roughly over the last year and my reaction: (in no particualr order…)

Good

• Static Maps API
• Earth Plugin and API
• Chrome Browser!
• Map Icons in Chart API
• Reverse Geocoding (& BBOX on forward)
• StreetView
• High resolution Imagry (including Wales/UK)

Bad

• No PhotoOverlay or 3D-navigator in Earth Plugin
• Google Installers and Updaters – a mess
• Google Maps API Terms of Service. 
• Google Pages shutting down (sites is NOT a real replacement atm) 
• No Google Spell Check for Chrome (as no toolbar), and other minor irritations
• Slow development on Google Maps – particully MyMaps (and MyMaps API)

Indifferent

• Google Earth 4.3 a disapointment (plus no real upgrades since) 
• Help Forums – good, but not there yet…
• GeoWeb Search API – close, but no cigar

… so its not all bad, I guess just getting more worked up about the bad, and don’t really have anything to say about the good.

OMG!

/background – this post is a bit of light relief after the serious business.

Initial reactions, seems quite good, if a little jumpy in controls. And as noted somewhere the 3Dconnextion does work after a fashion but it quickly gets disorientated and needs to be unplugged

While on a recent trip to the States, took this photo, stiched together from many shots with AutoPan Pro. Traditionally I have provided a GoogleEarth model using DigitalUrban’s panorama object, however this time will simply link to the placemark as provided by Gigapan.org:

View in Google Earth (but requires 4.2+ to take advantage of the PhotoOverlay – in full resolution glory!)

View in a Web Browser (using a flash viewer)

Thanks to Gigapan for providing this really super (and quite fast!) hosting for these high resolution images…