San Francisco Maps

A lot of very cool San Francisco maps have been popping up lately, so I thought I’d pull a few of them together. The first is The Islands of San Francisco by Burrito Justice:

This is exactly how I picture SF neighborhoods in my head.  The “canals” make neighborhoods seem much further than they really are. In the Twin Cities or even Los Angeles, I wouldn’t have thought twice about going a couple of miles. In San Francisco, though, it seems to take a lot more planning and ambition. Two miles? That’s nearly a third of the city!

The second has seen a lot of press lately and is one of the maps from the Geotagger’s World Atlas by Eric Fischer:

This map represents Flickr photos taken around the city. Using the photos’ timestamps and geotags, Fischer could determine where and at what speed the photographers were traveling – black lines represent speeds less than 7 mph (walking), red is less than 19 mph (biking), blue is less than 43 mph (motoring), and green is faster (jetpacking) – all plotted on an OpenStreetMap base layer.

Eric Fischer is responsible for another great San Francisco map, A day of Muni, according to NextBus:

This map uses the same color scheme to show average speeds of Muni vehicles over 24 hours.  Data was pulled from the SFMTA website.

This fourth map was created by my colleague, Tim Sinnot over at The Swordpress:

Sinnott used address data from DataSF to shade locations based on their address number. As you walk down a block, the color changes as the address numbers change.  Cool map based on a cool idea.

And finally, the much discussed Paramount Studio map of California’s geographical facsimiles:

While this map isn’t focused on San Francisco, I still thought it was worth including in this post. Look how close we are to the Sudan Desert! This really makes me want to drive around California, shooting home movies.  Who’s in?

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Google AJAX Libraries

I came across an old post that had some pretty good arguments for why we should link to Google’s AJAX libraries instead of downloading/uploading a static javascript library with each new project.

For future reference: the list of available libraries and the Developer’s Guide.

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jQuery Image Viewer Plugins

Today, I played with a couple of new (to me) jQuery image viewer plugins: the JQuery Cycle Plugin and  YoxView.  They both show a lot of promise, for very different reasons.

First, the JQuery Cycle Plugin works great as a light-weight (as little as 4Kb) image rotator. It cycles through a set of images defined in your html (defining the images in the html means they’re preloaded and ready to cycle – which means no waiting for the images to load as they cycle).  I have an example of a simple image rotator here: www.protectedlands.net

YoxView is similar to a lot of Lightbox-inspired slideshow plugins. However, in addition to having a nice out-of-the-box style and supporting both Flickr and Picasa albums, it also supports video and allows for keyboard access. (!!)  I don’t have any examples yet, but it looks like there is a YoxView plugin available for WordPress, so I may add that in, soon.

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A shiny new ParkInfo

My organization, GreenInfo Network, has developed and continues to develop an outstanding geospatial database of parks and open spaces throughout California, called the California Protected Areas Database (CPAD). To showcase CPAD, we built a site that allows users to search for parks, trails, and campgrounds around the state. And now finally, after many sleepless nights (mostly for the other half of our web development team – over in the far reaches of Minnesota), we are able to unveil a brand new version of ParkInfo:

ParkInfo was given a well-deserved face lift, complete with a brand new custom base map that allows us to display our (very good and accurate) parks without the interference of other (oftentimes quite inaccurate) parks. The street and boundary data comes from Open Street Map.

The site is still a work in progress at the moment, as we move everything into the cloud and tie up a few loose ends.  But all in all, it’s a great map and a great service for anyone interested in California parks.

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8-Bit Invasion

No, bad Donkey Kong!

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Converting KML to KMZ without Google Earth

I’ve run into a few problems when saving KML as KMZ in Google Earth, most notably when referencing web-accessible images in the balloons. At times, it appears Google Earth switches out the absolute paths with relative, local paths. Not so helpful when building a KML for a client who isn’t sitting next to me at my own computer. After searching for a solution to this problem, I stumbled upon a quick way to convert a KML to a KMZ while preserving the structure (and paths) of the original KML:

KMZ is really just a zipped version of a KML. So, simply zip up your KML using your favorite archiver (I’m currently using 7-Zip), change the .zip extension to .kmz and you’re done.  Of course, you can always unzip the KMZ to get back your original KML.

As an extra bonus, I’ve found that it sometimes produces smaller KMZs than does saving the file with Google Earth. And when developing layers for the GE plugin, every little bit you can do to shrink your file size helps.

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WordPress, huh?

You:  So, WordPress, huh?

Me:  Yeah, I know. I’m about the last to jump on the band wagon.

You:  What gives?

Me:  I guess I never paid it much attention. Because everyone uses it, I assumed it was a very closed, frustratingly simple system that was of no real use to me.  Really just a one-trick pony.

You:  You’re an idiot.

Me:  Yeah, I realize that now. I should’ve been paying more attention. Turns out it’s great. Very open and easy to skin, easy to create new templates and widgets. It’s pretty much what I wanted Plone to be all those years ago.  And I’ll admit, I do love me some PHP.

You:  Does this mean it’s your end-all, be-all answer to building websites?

Me:  No way. I appreciate  it’s simplicity and I definitely see how it could be useful for getting some simple sites up and skinned quickly, but I certainly don’t think it replaces a robust CMS for more complex sites.  I’m just adding another tool to my repertoire.

You:  So, what now?

Me:  Well, I guess next is Django. I’ve been meaning to get into that for a long time now. I just haven’t had time and really, my Python is a little lacking still. Gotta work on that.

You:  No, I meant “what now?” as in: It’ s a beautiful day outside! What are you going to do now that you’ve finished this post?

Me:  What do you mean what am I going to do? It’s Sunday — it’s Wiffle Ball Day!!

[You and Me high-five]

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