UK place name support for worldinpictures.org

Thanks to the excellent Geo-Names webservices you can now enter UK place names at worldinpictures.org to see photos from that location.

Previously I'd been relying on the Google geocoder which doesn't (yet) support the UK or a number of other countries, so photos from unsuppoted countries could only be viewed by entering a latitude/longitude (or post code for the UK). Now Geo-Names fills in the gaps so many more locations are supported.

Geocoded YouTube videos

I had a look at adding videos to worldinpictures.org this morning. YouTube looked like a good source for these and offers a limited API to get hold of them.

Unfortunately the grand total of geotagged videos at present on YouTube is... 38. Admitedly it wouldn't make a lot of sense to geocode many of the videos on there, but I thought there might be a few more.

Retrieving officially geocoded flickr photos

I've been updating worldinpictures.org to use the new flickr geocoding API. Unfortunately it doesn't provide a "find all photos near to a point ordered by distance" function, so I still need to keep a database of photo locations.

To keep my database up-to-date, I now to need to find the latest photos that have been "officially" geocoded, as well as those using the old unofficial geo:lon/geo:lat tags.

Turns out you can retrieve just the flickr photos that have been "officially" geocoded by setting the bbox parameter to cover the whole globe:

flickr.photos.search(bbox=-180,-90,180,90)

This is different to leaving out the bbox parameter (which would return all photos). Instead it essentially applies a filter which returns only those photos with official geocode information.

Firefox trounces IE

worldinpictures.org made it on to the front page of digg yesterday and as a result got rather popular. My poor server was stuggling in the morning so I invested in an extra 128Mb. The nice guys at memset got this upgraded promptly and it survived the rest of the day admirably.

Looking at the stats, it's interesting to see which browsers visitors were using:

1. Firefox: 66%


2. Internet Explorer: 21%


3. Safari: 9%


4. Opera: 2%

This is probably not representative of general users since digg visitors are probably more technically savvy than most but encouraging nevertheless.

Google maps tabbed windows

For the new map view at worldinpictures.org, I needed to support the situation where the search results contain several images taken at the same point. The obvious soltuion was to take advantage of the tabbed info windows provided by Google Maps ("info windows" are the pop-ups that display when you click on a map marker).

Unfortunately the tabs are quite wide so if you want a lot of tabs (and I could need 12) you need to have a very wide info window. So I had to implement my own "tabbing" system using simple numbered links. This seems to work well though and keeps the window to a reasonable size.

Now I need to change the title that appears when you hover over a marker to indicate the number of photos at that point. That can wait for another day though...