Monthly Archives: March 2007

Geograph Redesign, Take Two

I played around with an idea for new geograph design last year, but as the Ordnance Survey would like a revised design for schools use, I’ve dusted it off and worked on it some more…(click for bigness)

New design

I wanted to get all the important stuff above the fold, so we have the coverage map / entry point, a featured image, and the one-liner mission statement with an image count and call-to-action.

I’ve also dropped the use of Georgia as a body text font – while I think it gives the site a distinctive look, it does look poor at smaller point sizes, and it has caused the odd complaint.

Once that lot has tempted you to explore, the site guide gives you all the main entry points to get you started. As before, we feature recent news but give it a little more prominence centre stage. Finally, it’s time we highlighted the vibrance of the forums by linking to popular threads from the front page (at the same time we’ll most likely drop the need to register to view them – only to post).

Comments are more than welcome…

HertsLUG March 2007

Restoring a Virtual Machine Snapshot - amazing photoshop skillsBeen a bit lax in attending the Hertfordshire Linux User Group meetings of late. Finally made it last night and gave a talk on virtual machines which I’d been promising since December. I mainly concentrated on the free VMWare Server, since I use it for day-to-day development, but others made mention of their experiences with QEMU and the intriguing EasyVMX which allows online creation of virtual machines for use in VMWare Player.

The image above was a hastily constructed graphic illustrating how a destroyed virtual machine could be quickly replaced with a backup snapshot, which I demonstrated by performing an “rm / -Rf” on a virtual machine, which was fun.

The talk seemed to go down well anyway, and I hope to become more of a regular attendee!

Geograph’s Second Birthday

Geograph is two years old today! We recently filled 50% of all the grid squares, and have over 350,000 images submitted by 3750 photographers, all available for reuse under the Creative Commons licence. Recent press coverage and the Yahoo “Find of the Year” award have driven up usage recently, and it won’t be long before we routinely average 1000 new photos a day.

It’s been a pretty good year for the project, with the Ordnance Survey sponsorship deal, new servers coming online and increased publicity.

Though I’ve found my spare time quite stretched recently, I hope to have the tagging features complete “real soon now”. Communications and server maintenance have mopped up a lot of time recently though. Beyond that, we’ll be working with Ordnance Survey to further develop the education potential of the site over the rest of the year, and hopefully rolling out an improved site design too.

(Edit: Geograph was Radio 2’s site of the day!)