Category Archives: Geograph

Anything to do with the Geograph British Isles website

Some goals for May

Last month I set myself some goals in the hope that “going public” would be good spur into making me get them done. I was partially successful:

  • Complete tagging system for Geograph – early in the month it became clear that the Geograph server wasn’t coping well with traffic and photograph uploading was becoming a struggle. I stopped working on tagging and switched to completing “Guppy”, a desktop application for queuing uploads. I’ve got the basic framework almost complete, so a new goal will be to release it during May
  • Learn Python – I did enough to convince me to continue using it. I used it a couple of times when I might have otherwise turned to Perl. It’ll be a while before I’m truly up to speed, but I’ll most likely use Python now if I need to write more than 100 lines of Perl.
  • Release Pastebin source – success! I’ll continue enhancing it over the next month now that I’m on a roll. Had lots of positive feedback and ideas I’ll incorporate.

I think that if I hadn’t publically stated those goals, I would not have published the pastebin source or bothered with Python, so it’s been useful “life hack” that I’ll repeat! So, what to aim for in May?

  • Release Guppy – I’ll get a working beta of Guppy out there to aid Geograph contributors.
  • Lose a few pounds – I could do with losing a couple of stones, which doesn’t quite tally with geeking out in front of a PC every waking hour developing software. But, I’ll aim to lose half a stone and at report back on how I did it!

The metadesign of Geograph

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. For the record Mike, the “LordElph” moniker is explained in my about page 🙂

The Zen of CSS Design

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 a selection of Zen Garden designs from a variety of designers, and walks through the process they took while covering any neat CSS tricks that were pulled off to achieve the end result.

It’s a pleasure to read, with a nice layout and feel to it, and chock full of useful followup links on the techniques demonstrated. Highly recommended!

Yet another of my never-ending side projects for Geograph has been reworking the UI, and I’m hoping to ensure the XHTML has enough “hooks” to enable other designer to easily come up with alternative stylesheets.

Anyway, here’s my current effort so far.

Geograph Design

Web-2.0-a-licious, no?