October 23, 2006
Geonames are in
We've managed to migrate to the data from www.geonames.org. With a lot of places and a, let's say, less-than-optimal data model for geo data, it took some effort to import the data and migrate the current content. Thanks to ground work of Robin of Sonologic, and some more ploughing through data by Tim here, we now have a completely new set of place names.
Continue reading "Geonames are in"
Posted by rolf at 5:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 10, 2006
Moving to Geonames
We've been struggling with the geo data for a while, after compiling a database from various sources ourselves. A lot of work, very doable, yet usually beaten by other work on people's priority lists here. Over the last months, www.geonames.org seems to pick up more and more steam, and so we decided to move over and team up with the community maintaining that data. Tomorrow, we'll start migrating the current database content, and have a first go at staying up-to-date with the geonames.org changes.
There is some python code available to interface with the geonames web services, so that fuels my hopes we can also manage to link up in a more "web 2.0" way with the data services over there. It's about time we have some more mashing up than just our Google maps. If anyone is already working on a Django interface for this, I'd love to hear from you!
Posted by rolf at 12:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
September 1, 2006
CoolThePlanet silent launch, improvements and usability
It's been silent on the Melt blog, partly because I was unable to work for a few days, partly because we did a silent launch of www.cooltheplanet.net, and invited first people to test it out. In the meantime, we also worked on Speakup Middle East, our sister incarnation of the "Custard Melt" software. And we did a first round of improvements and fixes based on user feedback. We have a special group for that, by the way.
Continue reading "CoolThePlanet silent launch, improvements and usability"
Posted by rolf at 1:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
August 14, 2006
Go-live date, second deployment and other stuff
Well it's been a longer than expected road but we're nearly there. Our staging instance is running something that is 99.9% of a production branch. We would have gone live on Friday but staffing shortages mean it's going to be Tuesday now...
In other news we're working on a second instance of the platform, this one to support work Greenpeace will be doing in the middle east in the wake of the Lebanon crisis. You can read more about that project at it's holding site at www.speakup-middleeast.org . Hopefully that site will be up and running by the end of this week.
We've also been working hard to import our geo-data into the system. The GNS data we've been working with varies widely in quality. Some countries (eg Australia) can be pulled seamlessly out of the database, others (eg. Israel) suffer from duplicate or missing administration districts which has necessitated some manual fixes. The GNS data provides about ten times more data than the initial Geo-Rosetta data we deployed, so it's worth the hassle to get it in there.
Still, nearly there...
Posted by Martin Lloyd at 10:56 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
August 2, 2006
Second skinning
Yes, this week we are moving! Second-skinning the Melt site, and you can see it happen. After quite a few discussions and deliberations about name, logo, colours, what not, we're now at my preferred stage: doing it. Right now, I am at the office of Eight Media in Arnhem, where Simon is working live at the Melt staging site to implement the design. You will notice the name under which this all will go live: CoolThePlanet.net. Lots of little design decisions and checking it out with BrowserCam on different platforms, while hacking away at the Django templates, hopefully taking the opportunity to internationalise the static interface texts in there, and be ready for localisation in other languages. But first, counting down the days now to the opening of CoolThePlanet.net!
Posted by rolf at 4:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 25, 2006
Getting up to speed for developers
As we're moving along, I'm starting to collect stuff that can help people get started with Django. An interesting list of links on the blixtra blog: Top 30 Django Tutorials and Articles, complementing the overview of documentation on the Django site.
In the meantime, our colleagues at hosting have provided us a virtual machine to configure as the host for our platform. We are thinking about making such a virtual machine available to developers as well. It would make live so much easier: download the image, run it, and you're ready to help in developing our platform. No other downloads or setups needed, eveything including the automated testing ready for you to use.
Also, the data sets for our geo-location data are being merged. We have some 108,000 places in there, and about to add another 150,000 or so for the US, with a third collection still waiting. Getting everything together (longitude, lattitude, duplicate names, missing links to country or region, different spellings or transcriptions, there is some work involved before we get things on a map). Another interesting week ahead.
Posted by rolf at 12:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 12, 2006
Back online and moving ahead
Last Friday we had a problem with our development server, and so our Melt instances were unavailable for a while. Yesterday, a disk change in that server caused some more downtime, but things are back up again.
In the meantime, it has been a bit quiet here on the blog, while work was progressing. The naming and design are moving forward, and we should have final versions and be implementing the design in our templates soon. And... we now have the Melt project space at Sourceforge (thanks for your help, Misha!), so our software will become available through the new Sourceforge Subversion system.
Posted by rolf at 12:04 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
June 21, 2006
"Show and tell" this Thursday
This Thursday, the basement at our Greenpeace headquarters will be filled with Ruby and Django folks, coming for a "show and tell" meeting to talk about their projects. From 14:30 until 16:30 there will be six short talks with Q&A, including Ximon explaining how we work with Ruby here.
In the meantime, we're coming close to the "show and tell" phase of our platform. The last "blocking issues" for a first live release are being solved this week, and we're making progress with a design overhaul. OF course, that leaves us with only a million or so new ideas to develop on the platform, so we're also moving the open source side of the platform to a new platform to open it up for more people to contribute.
Keep an eye on this blog, or get in touch with me if you can help us! (rolf.kleef (at) int.greenpeace.org)
Posted by rolf at 1:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
May 30, 2006
NetSquared Online Sessions
I am in San Jose now, just a few hours away from the opening reception of NetSquared, probably the biggest "Web 2.0" conference I will be attending for a while, with some 350 participants expected. Many many interesting talks and sessions proposed, including a parallel online event, with two important items.
Tuesday 30th May, 11AM PST (which is 8PM Western Europe, 7PM UK, 6PM UTC) I will have an hour session on our Custard Melt project, and especially on what our ambitions and expectations are. I hope that many people will join to explore how we can make the online platform help in galvanising offline action.
At 4PM PST, 1AM Western Europe, midnight UK, 11PM UTC, Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions will be online for a session on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net". Of course, as the producers behind Al Gore's movie about climate change, this is of particular interest to us.
Posted by rolf at 1:31 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
May 24, 2006
World Cup on your Palm
A bit off-topic, but for those of you (like me) with a Palm-OS-based organiser: if you want to have the schedule of all World Cup matches available, keep track of scores, add the matches to your agenda, and even download them wirelessly, you might want to look at SK7Software's "World Cup 2006". They give the software away for free, but ask you to take action against climate change, refering to our colleagues at WWF in the UK.
Posted by rolf at 11:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
