… and… relax!

We’ve just completed a really intense GIS project covering the entirety of the North-West of England- which we’ve been working on since Christmas. This week is the first time I have come up for air since before Christmas, and it’s been really great! I’ve been working on integrating the new free Ordnance Survey data into our nascent SDI, and updating our sites map with new features, and new data from some of our other offices. It might not look like much, but there’s lots of open source goodness in there! My colleague Lucian, who knows much more about PostgreSQL than I do has put in a function that automatically updates this map when a new project is added to our archives database. Next steps- more data integration- with our grey literature server, and sites from our two French offices, and adding the raster mapping from the Ordnance Survey to our SDI.

Anyhow, it’s great to be back in the land of blogging- I hope to do a post soon on how to deal with this great new data now it’s available, and also to recap on the great OKCON 2010 conference that I went to at the weekend!

Apologies to the couple of people who were kind enough to report portable GIS bugs on the launchpad site, only to have their bugs totally ignored.  I didn’t set things up properly, and wasn’t getting email notifications. I’ll deal with the issues and post a fix if I can, and now I am getting notifications, so if anyone else finds any issues do let me know. I also don’t know how I managed to lose my contact form, but it’s back now. Must have been pixies…

… According to Wordle:

(Thanks to Electric Archaeology for the link)

It makes you think actually. The prevalence of words like “posts” might suggest that I am often apologising for breaks in posting, and certainly I know several people called “Chris” that I might concievably mention. I should use the terms “archaeology” and “gis” more, though, and of course this post itself will influence the result in future!

The title says it all really, Archaeogeek’s second birthday snuck by the other day without me even noticing. Mr Archaeogeek says this means I have to take him out for dinner. I’m sure he has it the wrong way around, but maybe he needs rewarding for putting up with me! Anyhow, happy birthday to Archaeogeek. I’m even more astounded than I was this time last year that my attention span has lasted this long, given that it has actually been a pretty tough year around these parts. Ah well, here’s to the next year- let’s hope this toddler doesn’t have too much of the “terrible-twos”!

In other news, there was a pretty low-key announcement from the British Cartographic Society about their 2008 Awards for “Excellence in [cartography]“. Props to the Openstreetmap/OpenLayers powered OpenCycleMap, and the Thames Estuary Coastal Habitat Atlas (can’t find a link to this) for triumphing in the Electronic Mapping category. However, tucked away at the bottom of the article was the following telling statement (slightly paraphrased): “(The Ordnance Survey Mastermap Award for Better Mapping was not awarded because there) was minimal or no innovative use of OS MasterMap data”. So… that’s what happens when you make the data too expensive to use… you get no innovative uses of it!

And finally, if you were worried about the affects of the switch-on in Cern earlier this week, well don’t worry. This website will help, and there’s even an rss feed for it. Phew!

Suddenly, in a couple of aggregated feeds that I subscribe to, I’m starting to see feeds of people’s comments, and individual posts from mailing lists. This doesn’t work for me in the slightest, as they are both snippets of conversations or threads, without real context when seen on their own. If people are interested in comments to a given post then surely they will subscribe to them anyway?

Solution- unsubscribe from the aggregated feed and go through and subscribe to the individual feeds that I’m interested in. To be honest, it’s well overdue, but a pain nonetheless…

You might have seen the new google talk chatback gadget, which allows you to embed a chat icon in your blog/website so guests can chat with you, if you’re available. The cool thing is that they don’t have to have a google account to chat with you.

The code from google comes in an iframe, which wordpress doesn’t like very much for security reasons. However, if you’re game, you can get it to work with a text widget (assuming you use widgets). Paste the code into a new text widget, surrounding it with <ul></ul> tags to space it out a bit if you like.

Having had some fun getting php and javascript code to work in a sidebar widget, I expected this to be a lot more difficult!

First impressions: actually responding to someone takes a few steps. You get notification in a web page which wants to open a new chat window, rather than integrating with whatever form of google chat you already use. It’s slower too. Despite that, and notwithstanding the increasing need to control IM status, without getting overwhelmed by offers to chat, I like it!

I finally got around to a bit of a site re-design last night- it’s a fairly straightforward modification of the original light theme, and sorts out a few issues I’d been having with custom php and text widgets. Actually, I should confess that I’m a complete loser when it comes to the design part of web-design, so I got my web-designer hubby to help with it. Thanks Barry!

Those of you that tend to visit only through your rss reader won’t, of course, be able to see any difference, so if you fancy popping around for a look at the new design, come on in, I’ll put the kettle on.

I also got the site running a little more quickly by disabling a bunch of plugins that I’m not really using. In the process I disabled geopress, which was a shame, but I hadn’t really been using it and it certainly had an adverse affect on the speed of the site.

I’m still very keen to investigate geotagging and georss, but I haven’t yet found the solution that works for me. What I want is something a bit simpler than geopress- I don’t necessarily want the map, just the coordinates embedded in every post, with a default set to my home location and an option to add new coordinates if I’m posting from somewhere else. More tinkering required I think…

I thought I’d see what all the fuss is about with feedburner, so those of you that subscribe to my direct feed rather than through Planet Geospatial or Online Archaeology might like to re-subscribe to the feedburner feed instead. I understand from the feedburner pixies that simply clicking on the “subscribe” link will take you to the new feed, or you could just click here…

Cheers!

In which I finally learn how to add a dynamic blogroll to my blog…

Those people who read this blog via the website rather than by rss (hi there!) will no doubt be pleased to know that I’ve finally added a blogroll to my site, listing some of the many other blogs that I like.

I held back from creating a static blogroll using the built in wordpress tool, because the sites that I like pretty much change daily, and it seemed like there should be a way of reflecting this using google reader’s public pages option. And there is- it just took me a while to get it to work. You will find some instructions here, but I needed even more help!
This blog explained a few months ago how to create a html/javascript element from a public google reader tag, for insertion in a blogger site or similar. It even gives you the ability to save the resulting blogroll as opml, which I think is really handy. However, wordpress doesn’t like things like that. You can manually edit your template to include the code but if, like me, you use the widget plugin, then you have to do something extra. Enter the execphp plugin, which executes php code in a widget.

So, for those of you who, like me, need a little extra help with this complicated web-design stuff:

1. In google reader, create a tag for all of those sites that you want in your blogroll.
2. Make that tag public and follow the instructions here to create the html/javascript element
3. Download and activate the execphp plugin
4. In an html editor, add html, head and body opening and closing tags to the code you generated above
5. Echo every single line of this as follows: echo “<html>\n”;
6. Surround everything with php tags
7. Paste the resulting code into a php widget in your blog and Robert is indeed your mother’s brother

Hope this is helpful!

Disclaimer- I’m sure it’s possible to do all sorts of damage with the php plugin, so please be careful and do this at your own risk. I will try and help getting this particular process working (confession- I had help from my own tame web designer) but can’t really offer support with the plugin in general.

Tomorrow (Thursday 6th September) is Archaeogeek’s 1st Birthday! Hooray! I won’t be able to post tomorrow as I will be in deepest darkest North Wales learning how to roll my kayak using the power of my mind alone, or something like that.

I hope to get a better posting rhythm soon- things are a little fraught at the moment because of things happening in my personal life (my parents and Grandparents have sold their houses in Kent- 300 miles from us, and moved to one big house in Kendal- 18 miles from us), and my work life (our company is also moving offices at the end of September). At some point I also need to prepare for FOSS4G, and finish up some ongoing projects. Ho hum…

Anyhow, it’s been fun. Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, and particular thanks to those who have posted comments- I am still ridiculously pleased every time someone does! Here’s to the next year!