Archive: Site news
Table of contents
- Trip viewer
- SPOT maps, and now wider...
- New Features section
- Audio notes
- Category archive change
- Change O&E template to use calendar for monthlies
- Table of contents on category archive pages
Trip viewer
The Spot Trip Manager is a great site, but I wanted a little more control over the layout and operation of my SPOT maps, and especially wanted to store my own SPOT data. I started working with Google Maps during the Iron Butt Rally, and got comfortable with version 3 of the API.
When SPOT announced support for XML data access, I decided to build my own trip viewer. A Perl script downloads the XML data every 15 minutes, parses it, and inserts new items into a MySQL database on my server. A PHP script displays trip data on a Google Map.
I've converted all of my SPOT maps over to my STV system. Click on the 'SPOT' link in the header to view the most recent map, and to get a list of available trips.
SPOT maps, and now wider...
I have a couple of changes to the site to report.
First, there's an updated SPOT page. Originally, I used rewrites to redirect tcfjr.goption.com/spot to my findmespot.com page — which isn't the best idea, privacy-wise. Next, I redirected to my current trip page on Jason Jonas' site. Better, but it still meant I had to ssh into my shell account to update the redirect url whenever I started a new trip.
Here's the new setup: all trips get an entry in the main blog, with a small iframe of that trip's STM map. But, the latest trip gets its own page with a larger map. Whenever I add a blog entry for a new trip, the tcfjr.goption.com/spot page gets rebuilt to show that trip.
I played with a few different ways of doing this, and this came out the best, by quite a margin. (I really didn't want to start a separate MT blog to hold the SPOT info.) One side-effect of this change is that an entry's keyword field is no longer embedded in the URL/filename of that entry; I use the keyword field to store the iframe reference for the larger map size, and it just didn't work to embed all that junk into a file name or URL.
I also added a SPOT entry to the banner, for easy access to the larger map page.
Secondly: the width of the main content section on each page is now 100 pixels wider. The old width was great back in the day when lots of people ran at 800x600, but thankfully those days are gone for good. The new width should make it easier to post photos and east-west-style maps.
I tried making it even wider, but it became too wide to read comfortably. I hope the new width is a good compromise — wide enough, but not too wide.
New Features section
When I get back from trips, the trip reports wind up hidden, even though they're more important than the average post.
I added a Features block to the top of the side-bar, to make it easier to find these important groups of related posts.
Audio notes
I've been working most of the afternoon and evening setting up a way for me to call a voice mail number and have it appear as an attachment here on this blog. I'm almost there, although I can't find a way to get the QuickTime plug-in to work in Firefox on the desktop at home. For security reasons I won't put the technical details here, but if you're interested send me an e-mail and I'll be happy to share them.
I still need to hack mtmail so it sets a category for the post, but otherwise it's holding together pretty well.
Category archive change
I noticed today that the table of contents on category archive pages ran into the first actual post. I added 1em of space at the bottom of the TOC to clean it up.
Change O&E template to use calendar for monthlies
Change the Odds and Ends template to use the calendar instead of the full list for the monthly archive listing.
Table of contents on category archive pages
I added a table of contents to the top of the category archive pages today. I hope this provides a quick way to find an individual post, without cluttering up the top of the page. We'll see.