Collected posts from the various blogs I’ve contributed to since 2002.
For anyone who might be wondering, I have been meaning to blog about Greenbelt. It’s just that with over 3000 photos on flickr, 18 or so videos on youtube, and dozens of blog entries, there’s been plenty of Greenbelt content to distract me from adding my own here. Tags: greenbelt2006, flickr, youtube, technorati
The good people at mySociety have been discussing the API they’ve opened up for They Work For You. They also have a few examples of how the API might be applied. Best of them, and possibly the best API demo I’ve seen, is a text adventure run over telnet. Entering a UK postcode will select an MP for you, and you have to guide that MP to Tony Blair’s Sedgefield constituency, doing battle with any opposing MPs you pass along the way, and eventually fight the PM himself. ...
When Grand Rapids WiFi–then a PHP application–first implemented google map support all the logic for producing those maps came in the templates. The controller passed the view a list of locations for that page, and it wrote out a series of javascript calls that produced the map. It was a little unreliable and very clunky, but it worked. When I moved the app over to rails, that was one aspect that I didn’t change, and it continued to work. ...
On Tuesday the Center for Digital Government announced that Michigan.gov had won its annual “Best of the Web” award. You can see the state’s press release here. The site has introduced a number of useful new features over the past year. If it weren’t for their recent addition of news feeds I probably would have missed this story, and quite a few others, and their efforts to improve accessibility, and unify public facing services are to be applauded. But the fact that they won the award is a sign of the poor state of governmental websites in the United States. ...
Back from Greenbelt last night, I spent some time this morning trying out flickr’s new support for ‘geotagging’ by placing all my photos on a map. The interface is nice and hopefully as the API is updated and more uses for the geodata emerge, more and more users will geotag their photos. I’m imagining a map of the Greenbelt site that lets visitors see photos based on when and where on the site they were taken, opening up all sorts of navigational possibilities. ...
I was very pleased to hear that Chicago O’Hare finally has wifi available for travellers. They’ve been lagging behind other airports in that regard. Previously the only option for getting online were booths where you pay around $5 for 15 minutes access. The new system is not free, but it does seem to have pretty good coverage across the terminals. Unfortunately it is also painfully slow quite a bit of the time, making me wonder if the convenience of being online is worth the frustration of waiting quite so long for sites to load. ...
The first lyrics to grab my attention during a first listen to Lamchop’s new album Damaged were from the beautiful, sprawling first track, Paperback Bible: i have always thought That handguns were made for shooting people Rather than for sport Why not use a rifle in most other applications? You might find a rifle or a musket But you’ll never hear a pistol There may always be Someone looking for or finding some ...
One of the projects demonstrated by Andy Turner at BarCamp Grand Rapids was Mapufacture. Developed by Andy, with Guilhem Vellut and Mikel Maron, the site functions as an RSS aggregator with a difference. As well as pulling in the latest content from feeds, it also extracts GeoRSS data from those feeds and plots the results on a google map. You can read an announcement here. Mapufacture is one of a number of apps that are demonstrating one of the key ways that I hope the web is going to move on from the ‘Web 2.0’ phenomenon, showing how open data can begin to be leveraged using tools designed for average users. Open APIs are all well and good, but it’s only as their potential is opened up to non-traditional users that I think we’ll really begin to see the potential. ...
Rails’ RXML templates (powered by Builder) are a great way to generate various different types of XML output from your application, but the documentation could be lacking. I’ve been working with namespaced content for a while but I’ve spent quite a while today trying to work out how to add an element in an explicit namespace, with attributes and text content. To create an ‘id’ element is straightforward: xml.id 'my-id-here' and then to put that tag in the ‘foo’ namespace you need: ...
This weekend was the inaugural BarCamp Grand Rapids. I was only able to make it for the day on Saturday, missing the previous evening’s introductions, talks, and trip to Grand Rapids Brewing Company, but it was good to be able to attend, and even better to have it just a short bike ride away. It was a fairly small group that was gathered, so almost all of the sessions ran in a single room. Java developers were in the majority—probably not a surprise given that it was the local Java Users’ Group that put the event together—but those of us working with dynamic languages made sure that those languages got their share of mentions. ...