The Where Am I web application is complete! Unfortunately, I didn’t really get too far with the photo geoblogging bit. Everything took a whole lot longer than expected. But that’s how development goes, especially when you are moving into unfamiliar territory as I was with Visual Studio 2005 and ASP.NET 2.0 just coming out. I was also dealing with Mobile Web controls. The basic idea is this:
- When we stop for the night, take note of our GPS coordinates.
- Point my cell phone browser at a hidden mobile web page. It looks something like this:
- Enter our password, GPS coordinates, and timezone offset.
- Click Finish.
- At this point, the web server does some calculations and downloads street maps from Yahoo’s map service and topo maps from Terra Server at different zoom levels and caches them on our web server. In addition, an entry is written into a SQL Express database. For privacy reasons, only the farthest zoom level on the Yahoo map is copied to a location visible on our main page.
Folks can visit http://whereami.koransky.com/whereami/ to see more detailed maps, including the topo map, but it does require a password (contact us). Here is an example of what the page looks like with a topo map loaded:
Took me about 3-4 days to get this done the way I wanted it, and It was the pesky things that I hadn’t really played with before that took the longest, including webhost4life hosting issues, SQL Express, javascript image preloading (with “please wait” message),
I’d still like to do more with it. For example, I’d like to get the map viewer into a server side custom control. I think a comment column would be nice too, so I can write up a quick bit while posting our coordinates.
As far as the photo geoblogging goes, I haven’t gotten as far as I would like. I need to work on the WinForms based geoblog editor, but you can preview what I have done with javascript/html here: http://whereami.koransky.com/whereami/overflow/default.html Move your mouse over the first three photos and watch the map move. Thanks to David Lovell for his help on configuring the initial layout.
PS: to my Nexidia friends, I could not get log4net working in ASP.NET 2.0. I switched over to NLog for logging and couldn’t be happier. A pretty nice logging system, and most importantly, it works in ASP.NET 2.0. (I’ve also noticed NAnt hasn’t updated for 2.0 yet either!)