Plak

Plak implements Google Street View

Mike — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 09:18:39 +0000

Yesterday morning I had a meeting with someone who is interested in using the Plak code for an application of his own. One of the questions he asked was, “What about Street View?” So, after the meeting, I decided to hook Plak into Street View. If you don’t know what Street View is, take a look at this - Google Maps Street View

Anyway, the implementation was really easy. It took me longer to squeeze the HTML, nicely and cleanly, into the More Info page, then it took to hook that HTML into the JavaScript that displays the Street View images.

So, each Plak’s more Info page now has two Street View buttons. One button is located on the navigation menu bar at the top of the page, and the other is located just below the map. Clicking either Street View button will result in the same thing happening: a pop-up div will be opened and Street View images for the current Plak will be displayed (assuming that Street View information actually exists for the location).

To close the pop-up div, click the little blue X in the top right hand corner.

Using Street View has the added bonus of automatically finding geotagged images from Panoramio, which is fantastic for Plak users wanting to attach more images to the Plaks they have added. Just add your additional images to Panoramio, making sure that they are geotagged with the same GPS coordinates as your Plak, and when someone views Street View information for your Plak, hey presto! They’ll get your images as well.

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More KML support for Google Earth

Mike — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:44:38 +0000

For quite a while already, Plak has provided a dynamic KML interface for Google Earth - Which is documented here Dynamic KML from Plak for Google Earth. Using the dynamic KML interface has probably been a bit too technical for most people, so I decided to implement a second KML interface, which is as easy as clicking a button.

On the new navigation menu bar at the top of each Plak’s More Info page, you’ll now find a button labeled KML.

If you have Google Earth installed, clicking the KML button will do the following: -

1. Your browser will ask you to confirm the download and saving of the KML - KML is nothing more than a bit of XML.
2. If you allow the download and saving, Google Earth will automatically open (if it isn’t already open), and will “fly” to the location of the place marks included in the KML.

The KML includes information for the Plak currently being viewed on the More Info page, as well as information for 20 places closest to that Plak.

I hope that the KML button makes life a little easier, and a little more exciting, for those who like to play with Google Earth

Please remember that KML obtained in this way is not dynamic. i.e. It will not automatically refresh itself to reflect changes in the Plak database. If you want dynamic KML, please use the Plak KML interface which is documented here Dynamic KML from Plak for Google Earth.

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Improvements to the Plak site

Mike — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:12:11 +0000

As part of the ongoing quest to make the Plak website better, a number of things have been changed and improved over the last few weeks.

The most noticeable change is the change to the Plak home page. The page was previously designed, as a fixed width page, to accommodate 800 x 600 monitors - Which is probably the lowest resolution still used, excluding mobile devices, of course. The changes to the Plak home page have now made it a variable width and variable height page, which I think better accommodates people with higher resolution monitors. The Plak home page will still accommodate 800 x 600 monitors, by implementing a minimum width and height.

There have also been numerous changes to each Plak’s More Info page.

Firstly, the More Info page will now (just below the map) list 20 places closest to the Plak being viewed. Hovering the mouse over each link will indicate the location of the “nearby place” on the map.

Secondly, because a lot of information is now being displayed on the More Info page, I thought it would be a good idea to place a navigation menu bar at the top of the page. Clicking the relevant button on the navigation menu bar will cause the page to “jump” down to the related section of information. The Streetview and KML buttons aren’t for navigating the More Info page. They have different functionality which I will discuss in other blog posts.

Lastly, because the navigation menu bar allows easy navigation to relevant sections of the More Info page, I thought it would be a good idea to include something that would easily accommodate navigation back to the top of the page.

Each section of information on the More Info page now displays a little green arrow. Clicking the green arrow will “jump” the page back up to the top.

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More “good stuff” added to Plak

Mike — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:52:48 +0000

Today I worked on adding some statistical stuff to Plak. Well, “statistical” might be stretching it a bit, but what other word should I use?

Plak will now keep track of the number of times that a Plak’s More Info page has been viewed, and it will keep track of the number of impressions that promoted Plaks have received.

These two pieces of information are displayed at the bottom of each Plak’s Edit page. i.e. If you are logged into Plak, click the My Plak button, then click the My Plaks button, then click the Edit button, and look at the bottom - Just above the Update button.

Seeing as Plak is now keeping track of the number of times that a Plak’s More Info page has been viewed, I thought it would be nice to add a “Most Popular” page.

On the Plak menu bar, you’ll now find a button labelled, Most Popular - Hmmm… I guess that was pretty obvious Clicking the Most Popular button will display a list of 20 Plaks that have been viewed the most. The list is ordered in descending order.

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Dynamic KML from Plak for Google Earth

Mike — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:01:43 +0000

Over the last few days I’ve been messing around with KML for Google Maps and Google Earth. As is pretty typical for most things done by Google, nothing ever works exactly as advertised. Dynamic KML (dynamic in that it automatically refreshes itself periodically) works perfectly with Google Earth, but alas, no matter what I’ve tried, it simply refuses to work with Google Maps. The KML does get imported into Google Maps, but it never refreshes itself.

Anyway, if you play with Google Earth, and would like to display data from Plak, I have slapped a dynamic interface together, and here is how it works: -

The URL for the KML interface is http://plak.co.za/DynKML.php

There are a number of parameters that can be passed to the interface, and I’ll discuss each one in detail below. Without any parameters, the interface, by default, will return all placemarks within ± 0.3 degrees of latitude, and ± 0.3 degrees of longitude of -29.120973840852503, 26.226425170898438 - Which happen to be the GPS coordinates of Bloemfontein

No one, except the people that live there, are interested in Bloem, right? Hmmmmm… Nasty comments from Bloem residents expected So here are the parameters that can be passed to the KML interface to return data for other parts of the country: -

lat - The latitude for the centre of the area you want to display. Default = -29.120973840852503
lng - The longitude for the centre of the area you want to display. Default = 26.226425170898438
latbounds - The north/south bounds of the area you want to display. Default = 0.3. Maximum value = 1.
lngbounds - The east/west bounds of the area you want to display. Default = 0.3. Maximum value = 1.
type - The type of placemarks to display within your area of interest. Default = All.

Valid values for type are as follows: -

1 = Lodging
2 = Food & Drink
3 = Fuel and Car Hire (Also includes other automotive type places)
4 = Attractions
5 = Recreation
6 = Entertainment
7 = Shopping
8 = Police (I think Plak includes data for every single SAPS station in the country)
9 = Education
10 = Medical
11 = Other (Everything that doesn’t fit into any of the other types)

And here are a few working examples. Lets say you want to display all attractions within ± 0.5 degrees of latitude, and ± 0.5 degrees of longitude, of Cape Town: -

http://plak.co.za/DynKML.php?lat=-33.92683895146819&lng=18.421669006347656&latbounds=0.5&lngbounds=0.5&type=4

All Police stations in Grahamstown: -

http://plak.co.za/DynKML.php?lat=-33.31105604765858&lng=26.525416374206543&type=8

All placemarks within ± 0.4 degrees of latitude, and ± 0.7 degrees of longitude, of Durban: -

http://plak.co.za/DynKML.php?lat=-29.857021695057888&lng=31.02985382080078&latbounds=0.4&lngbounds=0.7

And here’s how to hook the dynamic KML into Google Earth: -

1. Right click on the Google Earth places tree

2. Select Add from the context menu

3. Select Network Link from the Add menu

4. Give your new network link a name

5. The most important bit - Supply the link URL. I’m going to use the Durban example shown on this page

6. If you want to, you can also supply a description

7. When you are done, click the OK button

8. Taaaadaaa!

And this is what the Plak placemarks will look like in Google Earth

(Click the thumbnail to view the full size image)

Because the network link that has been added to Google Earth is dynamic, the KML will automatically refresh itself every 10 minutes. This means that any changes to any of the Plak placemarks, that are within the bounds of your area of interest, will automatically be displayed on Google Earth. Any new Plaks will automatically appear on the map. Deleted Plaks will automatically disappear. Plaks that change their GPS coordinates will automatically reposition themselves, and any changes to other associated data will also be updated automatically.

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Plak data imported into Google Maps

Mike — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:25:32 +0000

Today I wrote a bit of PHP code to export the Plak data as KML. Once that was done, I imported all of the KML into Google Maps. Due to the fact that Google limits the number of placemakers per map to a maximum of 200, I had to split the import across 43 maps, which is a bit of a pain, but anyway…

After the import, just for fun, I decided to see what the map would look like displaying all 7500+ Plak placemarkers: -

Click the thumbnail to see the full size image.

If you are interested, here are the URLs for each of the 43 maps: -

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A few additions and changes to Plak

Mike — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:55:58 +0000

Once again I’ve been working on Plak. Making improvements, I hope

Anyway, here is a list of things that have been added and/or changed: -

1. Other category added

It just didn’t seem right having people add financial services and construction companies to the shopping category. So I added a new category - Other. Yeah, a catch-all for everything that doesn’t fit nicely into the existing categories.

2. Weather information added to the More Info page

Each Plak’s More Info page now attempts to display local weather information. When the page is loaded, the longitude and latitude of the Plak is used to query Weather Underground for nearby weather stations. If Weather Underground responds with a list of nearby weather stations, a second query is made to determine weather details for a particular weather station. In obtaining the weather details, preference is given to weather stations located at nearby airports, as weather reported by airports tends to be more accurate and reliable. If there is no nearby airport, an attempt is made to query weather data from a nearby “Personal Weather Station.” If the longitude and latitude query reports that there are no nearby weather stations, then the More Info page won’t (obviously) display any local weather information.

The “Last Updated” date and time, is the date and time at which the local weather station last reported data to Weather Underground. The date and time is shown as SAST - South African Standard Time.

3. Changes in determining sunset and sunrise times

A few days ago I implemented a set of night time weather icons that would automatically kick-in between sunset and sunrise. Calculating these sunset and sunrise times was a real pain in the bum, and it was sometimes making the loading of weather information really slow. So, from now on, as far as Plak is concerned, the sun in South Africa always sets at 18:00 and always rises at 6:00. Yippee! Bright sunny mornings in the middle of winter

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Set of night time weather icons implemented

Mike — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 18:29:07 +0000

It seemed a bit funny seeing icons of a bright shinning sun, knowing that it was dark outside. So I’ve implemented a set of night time weather icons, that will automatically kick-in between sunset and sunrise.

Sunset and sunrise is calculated using the geographical centre of South Africa. Before we get into an argument about where the actual geographical centre of the country is, I simply took the latitude and longitude of the point halfway between the most southern point and most northern point, and halfway between the most eastern point and the most western point of the country. Yes, it might mean that sunset comes a little early for some, and a little late for others, but calculating accurate sunset times for every single GPS location in the country, for every single day of the year could be a little… Errrmmm… Time consuming. Oh! Before we split any hairs about civil, nautical or astronomical sunset, the sunset (and sunrise of course) times are calculated using a sun azimuth of 90°

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Beefed-up weather information on Plak

Mike — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 08:09:07 +0000

Last week I spent some time hooking Plak into weather information supplied by weather.co.za. I wasn’t entirely happy with the way things were working, or the level of South African coverage provided by weather.co.za. So, on Saturday, I unhooked Plak from weather.co.za, and hooked it into the weather services provided by Weather Underground.

Weather Underground provide a simple API for accessing international weather information, and their level of coverage for South Africa, while still incomplete, is much better than that provided by weather.co.za.

Weather icons displayed on the Plak map will now give an actual indication of the weather conditions at a particular location. If the data only contains temperature information for a location, an information icon is displayed.

Because Weather Underground provide information for many more locations in South Africa than weather.co.za does, I’ve also made the weather information dynamic. i.e. Every time the map is moved or zoomed, Plak re-queries the Weather Underground data, and at higher zoom levels, more weather locations are displayed.

Clicking a weather icon on the Plak map will now display a weather information popup that looks something like this: -

All I now need to do is work out when sunrise and sunset is, so that at night a moon icon is used to indicate clear or partly cloudy conditions.

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Weather information added to Plak

Mike — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 10:32:19 +0000

Over the last few days, some of you may have noticed that I’ve been working on adding weather information to Plak.

If you haven’t noticed, down at the bottom of the Plak sidebar (To the left of the map on the Plak home page) is a new check box.

Checking the Weather check box will display a whole bunch of sun icons all over the map. This doesn’t mean that the sun is actually shinning in all of these places, but it does mean that if you click one of the sun icons, detailed weather information, for that place on the map, will be displayed.

To get even more details of the weather in a particular part of South Africa, click the link at the top of the weather information box (in this case, click the Weather in Calvinia link).

Currently, Plak is providing weather information for 71 different places in South Africa. The actual data is provided by weather.co.za. So if the information is incorrect, please take it up with them

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