The Where 2.0 conference was last week in Burlingame, CA in sunny Northern California where they were apparently having a heat wave. The heat, while not quit “right” for the area, was a highly enjoyable experience having come from (and returned to) the chilly, rainy East Coast.
The conference this year was a more enjoyable experience mostly because I went with the goal of just trying to talk to and learn from the people that I met rather than freak out about not being a crack programmer/hacker.
While hackers and geowankers are the people who pushed mapping for the masses (I’m not overly fond of the word neogeography) into the public eye over the past few years they are not the only ones who care about location and information. However, they are the ones who can make things work. Since I get frustrated with my limitations wrt programming the decision to just talk to people about why they were at the conference and to exchange thoughts with people was a good move.
I spent a lot of time talking to a very diverse guy named Thomas (website) about web stuff (he’s done a lot of web design), geo stuff, travel, family, and writing. It was good to have someone to bounce thoughts about the conference off of as compared to last year where I didn’t feel comfortable talking to many people. There was a wider range of participants this year: academics looking to expand their curricula, hackers, journalists, employees of the big guys, and people like me who are wondering where they can fit in now. It was interesting however to hear non hacker/programmers referred to as “tourists” on the back channel. Maybe that concept stems from how this conference developed and who was around when it first started four years ago. I wasn’t - I just found it last year.
And the back channel (IRC), now that was in interesting find. I was talking to a guy at lunch on the first day who said that he used IRC when he was programming. I had to ask what IRC was. Turns out I apparently had just forgotten about it because it wasn’t something that I had to use anymore after grad school. It’s sort of a Chat or IM service for groups and a lot of programmers still use it when they are fiddling with stuff in the middle of the night - because it’s not the middle of the night everywhere in the world and someone will be awake to help them out. Anyway, on the second day I decided to see if there was a channel for the conference and low and behold there was. And with a few minutes of experimentation and a quick trial download of mIRC I was on my way (I’ve since discovered Mibbit which will work for me at work). Wow, can those guys/gals? be catty! Brady stepped in at one point to rein them in but over all the commentary was pretty cool . Something that they (the conference peeps) might consider next year is streaming the IRC channel on stage - I got this idea from the woman I sat next to on the return flight to NYC. She said that is what they do at USC where she teaches and it allows for commenting/questioning but is almost self-policed in terms of cattiness. People tend to watch what they say when the anonymity is partially removed. While I liked the conversation alongside the presentations (it provided some valid commentary) - in this particular case it felt a little elitist.
After the conference I headed to sunny Oakland (which is often sunny anyway but was HOT this time) to spend some quality time with friends and not think so much about geography except to enjoy my current location.
So it seems that most of the hits on my site are from people looking for coordinate conversion info.
Besides the links for online conversion that I listed a few posts ago… there is a great desktop program for coordinate conversion. It is called Corpscon.
The link is here: http://crunch.tec.army.mil/software/corpscon/corpscon.html
This is by far the most accessible and easiest to use coordinate conversion program and I used it all though my Geodesy/GIS/Remote Sensing/Photogrammetry studies way back when. This program
“…allows the user to convert coordinates between Geographic, State Plane, Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) and US National Grid systems on the North American Datum of 1927 (NAD 27), the North American Datum of 1983 (NAD 83) and High Accuracy Reference Networks (HARNs). Corpscon uses the National Geodetic Survey (NGS) program Nadcon to convert between NAD 27, NAD 83 and HARNs.”
It totally kicks ass and I have used it many a time to check where coordinates should be in a particular coordinate system.
OK - I have to say that I am completly fed up with this whole photo gallery thing.
I had it lucky when I actually managed to integrate the StopDesign template into my MovableType based version of http://www.steady-as-she-goes.com. Now things are just so much more complicated.
After finally getting Gallery2 installed and running I can’t seem to figure out what to do with it. I wanted simple, clean and easy and Gallery2 certainly isn’t any of that especially if you want to adjust things. I mean really, what is an Image Block? A Sidebar Block? I go to change the theme and now somehow I’m stuck on the default theme (Matrix - which is ugly as sin) with no way to get rid of it - no links present themselves even though other themes are activated. Maybe I turn it off on a different page?
So there are millions of pages of options and the Help Wiki isn’t so helpful. I don’t really like this Codex documentation methods that people seem to be moving towards because it’s so hard to navigate back and forth and to figure out what you’ve already looked at and what the next steps are.
I admire all the work that goes into these Gallery Plug-Ins - they are an attempt to keep control over your own site rather than just dump links to Google Web Albums or Flickr into your site, but integration to existing blogs seems near impossible if you don’t have a PhD in Web Development (ie - programming).
Anyway, if you can’t tell, I’m annoyed. No one album has it all. And then there is the problem really, what is “it all”?
My dream list for a photo gallery for integration into Wordpress or MovableType:
- Clean layout - that can be integrated into you existing blog. All these plugins have all sorts of bells and whistles that look like crap when integrated into the design of your blog. Either they cannot be integrated easily which means that the photo gallery has a completely different look than the rest of your blog or they just have ugly themes without much documentation on how to change. I suppose a book on CSS and html would help, but that just seems like soooo much work.
- I want something almost exactly like the StopDesign templates
- A page with the Galleries or Albums
- Click on an album and you get a sample photo and a description
- Click to view the album (gallery) and you get thumbnails and the description again (ok - this and the above could be on one page)
- Click a photo and you are in the gallery - next and back functions, pretty (although I could go with cleaner), description (brought in from Picasa), comments. Maybe a few other things like number of times viewed etc.
- Ability to import associated photo descriptions. Right now there are three ways. 1) No descriptions, 2) use an xml or html formatted template to import into your blog, 3) Read data from EXIF. But number three seems impossible to find. Also, not many photo organization packages seem to have the ability to write the descripiton to the EXIF. I tested this process in RoboGeo (my all around favorite photo photo geocoding program) but have no way to look at the EXIF created (yet another research project) and don’t know how to take that info and shove it into something like ZenPhoto anyway
- Album associated GoogleMap based on geo-tags. Honestly, I don’t know where this would fit on a photo gallery page, but it can somewhere, I swear. Maybe it’s something like look at the photos in a gallery format or look at the photos on a map (only the geocoded ones). So maybe you have two different types of gallerys - one for geocoded images and one for non-geocoded images. Yeah, that would work.
- Easy to sort photos. Ideally, they are in the sort order as exported from Picasa2, but other options would be sort by shooting date or file name. I use shot data myself, and sometimes rearrange things if they make more sense in a different order.
Oh I wish I had the patience for programming, but it seems that I like the thought process rather than the programming. I never was very good at programming: Basic, Fortran, Matlab, C then I gave up - couldn’t afford the compliers back then and sucked at it anyway. Now I’m having to actually delve back into this stuff just so I can figure out how to set up a weblog that doens’t look exactaly like all the others. I suppose the puzzle solving is a lot of fun - it’s just that no one really ever knows just what you went through to make a site.
