Ed Parsons blogged his personal thoughs on “Ordnance Survey 2.0″ – pretty frank stuff, given he is the CTO of Ordnance Survey.
He writes about allowing free access to OS data and letting “…users discover the value in OS data by actually deploying it, and if the value is there, they will pay for it later.”
I’ve [...]
One of the reasons I started this blog was that I felt we were doing some interesting things with the Geograph site which wasn’t getting documented outside of private emails between the team. The recently announced sponsorship deal with Ordnance Survey is prompting a lot of activity in the team at the moment, so there’s [...]
CVS access at SourceForge.net has been shaky for the past month. Couldn’t check anything into Geograph yesterday, and the SourceForge.net Service Status suggests it won’t be fixed until the 12th May (though even that looks like a guess).
Looks like it’s time to migrate it over to Subversion…
Last night Geograph British Isles covered its 100,000th grid square. It’s just incredible that in just over a year we’ve got an image for 40% of the 1km grid squares in Great Britain. It’s also good to see that depth is being developed too – we’ve over 160,000 images in total, and it looks likely [...]
The OpenStreetMap project is going to map the Isle of Wight this weekend, using hundreds of volunteers simply recording a tracklog with their GPS units.
This is fantastic, and it will be interesting to see how successful such an effort is. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Geograph, it’s that if you can attract even [...]
Mike Leggett has been sharing his musings on Geograph and it’s interesting to read an outside analysis of the phenomenon. I only came across it today even though Technorati keeps a watchful eye on Geograph related blog posts for me. Seems it’s been mentioned in the forums and the observer has become the observed!
Interesting reading!
P.S. [...]
The CSS Zen Garden site is a fantastic demonstration of what CSS can do. A few days ago I found myself with a few hours to kill while waiting for my car to be repaired, and while browsing a bookshop came across a book about the site – The Zen of CSS Design
The book takes [...]
Geograph attracts the occasional bit of unfriendly leeching, where someone mirrors the entire site at high speed. Considering we’ve got close to 250,000 pages, that can be quite a bandwidth hit for a non-profit entity.
We’ve policed this manually up until now, but we’ll certainly need to add some automated software protection to separate legitimate browsers [...]
Thought I’d play around and make a Wordpress plugin to show a selected Geograph image, and form the beginnings of a REST style API for Geograph.
First thing was to provide a way to obtain picture metadata – this was pretty straightforward – requesting a URL like this
http://www.geograph.org.uk/api/photo/40212
Returns an XML result like this
<geograph>
<status state=”ok”/>
<title>From Bygrave to [...]
Producing Open Source Software is a great looking book which you can read online. I’ve only had time to skim a few chapters but it does resonate with my experiences developing Geograph. While some of it can be applied to commercial teams, the majority of it is about dealing with the unique elements of open [...]
