Matt Down Under

You may have noticed it, the new design is here. Everything is now updated and seems to be working, most bugs are probably fixed, if you still encounter any please tell me. I love the new design, since July I have been working on it but it’s far more than just a new outfit. Most changes have happened behind the scenes.

For those who are interested in the technical side of things, changes focus on two topics: first, I wanted to have a blog where I can post from my iPhone and everything gets handled and displayed right automatically, even with pictures. Secondly, I wanted to have a better picture gallery. I was always annoyed by the fact that I constantly needed to upgrade the gallery plugin and it didn’t integrate with my iPhone. So I thought about better solutions.

In the end, I decided to move my picture gallery to Google Picasa Web Albums, a free picture gallery service similar to Flickr. I’ve been using Picasa for years and I like it. And I like Google as well, they offer great free services and superb API’s for developers to integrate their services in third party projects. I don’t really like Flickr, as it belongs to Yahoo and Yahoo requires you to provide all sorts of personal data when you sign up for a free account. Google doesn’t ask for personal details, basically you can sign up for an anonymous account and use all services for free, that’s great.

So I moved all photos to Picasa and spent hours remembering where I took them, to place them on a map. I always wanted a solution where you can actually see where the photo was taken. Picasa offers this service, if your photos contain geo coordinates it will extract them and place the photo on a map. If they don’t have coordinates, you can place them manually and that’s what i did for all my photos as they didn’t have it due to absence of GPS in my previous cameras.

But now I needed to integrate it into Wordpress. I wrote a custom Wordpress plugin which loads an XML feed from Picasa, extracts information about my photo albums and displays it on the Gallery page. When you click on one of the albums a Google Map will open which loads a KML file from the corresponding Picasa album and displays an overlay with all photos from that album. So you can see where it was taken.

Apart from the fact that it looks awesome, it has the advantage for me that I don’t need to care much for my photo gallery. For example if I take a picture with my iPhone, the integrated GPS automatically adds geo coordinates to the file. I can then upload the photo directly from my iPhone to Picasa Web Albums and it is automatically placed on a map. If you then go to my gallery page here on my website, the album to which I added the picture gets listed on top, because it is sorted by the last update. And the new photo will automatically get displayed on the map. Even if I add a new album in Picasa Web Albums, it gets added to my website automatically. Everything works as automatic as it could be and fits my needs, that’s exactly what I wanted, it saves me time and nerves.

It still has some display bugs on the map overlay sometimes (probably errors in Googles scripts) but still I absolutely love it!! It’s the most fancy, stylish and sophisticated blog theme I ever created. Other things you can see here (in older posts that contain images) is that inline images get framed with polaroid borders automatically. Most of the stuff is realised with scripts, I like to use the Mootools framework.