Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

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’m in Southampton for the 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference. This is always a really interesting and often inspiring get together with a mix of commercial archaeologists such as myself and academic archaeologists (they normally have the best presentations).

There’s wifi available in my lovely salubrious Travelodge room, so I’ll aim to post some feedback on the first day’s talks tomorrow evening.
This post is also exciting for me, because I’m experimenting with the Geopress plugin for WordPress. I first heard about it a few weeks ago but on my train journey today I read Andrew Turner’s great O’Reilly Shortcut book on Neogeography and that convinced me to give it a go…

I have to say that I really enjoyed Andrew’s book. He manages to cover the spectrum of “Neogeography” from the very basic intro to some reasonably high-end ideas such as microformats in a consistently easy and pleasant style. I learnt a lot from it, and there were certainly a few things I’m going to try (Geopress is the first).

Anyhow, here goes with the map:

After yesterday’s post, I was wondering about geotagging, and specifically whether or not it’s possible to export the location data created in the geotagging process as standard flickr tabs. If I’m going to put my photos in Flickr and Google Earth I don’t really want to have to go through the geotagging process twice! Anyway, in the Flickr Geotagging Group I found a link to a great Greasemonkey script for adding visible lat and long tags to photos, which I’m hoping to explore further.

Yahoo’s idea of where the photos were taken is, however, somewhat different to mine- it has labelled the photos taking in Tobermory as Ledaig, and those in Iona as Baile Mor. It did get Oban right though, which is a relief!

Well, everyone’s got to start somewhere!

I’ve just been trying out the new Flickr Geotagging capabilities, uploading photos of my recent wedding on the Isle of Mull, just off the west coast of Scotland. As countless people have said elsewhere, Flickr have got it pretty much spot on with this geotagging interface. Being able to drag and drop the photos is great- does it get more intuitive than that?

My only qualm is the quality of the mapping for the UK. It’s not as good as Google, showing only major roads and towns, and believe me there aren’t many of them on Mull…

Anyhow, this is a work in progress, and I want to investigate the different methods of getting the geotagged images into Google Maps/Earth as well.