I have added a further update today. It is now possible to search for places outside the UK.

Non-UK places are handled by Google’s Geocoder. I haven’t had a great deal of time to test it so I have left the UK searches exactly as they were, dealt with by the Photospots code itself.

I have also added the new terrain option to the map.

I’ve just uploaded a significant update to Photospots. Hopefully it all works. Changes are:

Layout.

This should be fairly self evident, but it has changed.

Clustering

I have added marker clustering using a modified version of Jef Poskanzer’s Clusterer. By default normal Photospots show up as blue. If there are too many, too close to each other, then a grey arrow will show up. Click it and the map will centre on that location and zoom in to show the underlying Photospots. The settings may not be quite right yet so if you see anything being odder than you expect let me know.

If you apply a filter, for example to show all the pubs, then the clustering will turn off. If you remove the filters then it will come back on again.

Deleting

It is now possible to delete photospots you have added.

Adding / Editing

This should work much better now. Most of the fancy stuff is gone, just nice simple forms. I hope it is all pretty self evident.

It is also possible to name your website now, so if you are adding a link back to it you can add the name for some added linky goodness.

I hope you all think it is an improvement. I do.

I have left Photospots this running for a little while to get a flavour of how it was used, what would be right with it, and what would be wrong.

I think I now have a good handle on the problems, and so a major rewrite is on the way in the near future.

If you want to add anything into the mix then now would be a good time to do so.

Thanks, Andy.

I upgraded photospots today with a few additions. Most were minor fixes of things, but I also added a comment option. This isn’t limited to existing users so anyone can comment. Hopefully the humanity check will be enough to keep the robots out.

Over the weekend I changed the way submitted images are dealt with.

Originally images could be any size and they would simply be loaded and shown as smaller images. I encouraged the use of thumbnails to make sure they loaded in a timely way but that was it.

The changes

In making the changes I had a few important considerations:

• Images need to load quickly;
• It is better that using the images doesn’t cost you anything, i.e. erode your bandwidth;
• I need to have a backup for when sites fall over, and they inevitably do;
• Some people have issues, not unfairly, about sites linking to large images on their site;
• Some blogging software either doesn’t create thumbnails, or the users don’t delve into it far enough to find out what they are called.

So I have changed what happens when images are requested. When an image is needed the script checks to see if we already have a thumbnail cached; if we do then this is served from the cache. If no thumbnail is cached then then the script checks to see if an image exists on your server, if it does it creates a thumbnail from that image and caches it on the photospots server. If an image doesn’t exist then a “no image available” image is returned.

This means the url you provide for your image never appears on a page of this site. NOTE the link to your website you provide will always appear. If you provide an image for this site then you deserve any link love I can give you (as long as the image isn’t dodgy). It also means that, in theory, providing you don’t change the image your photospots entry points to, your site should only be hit once to get the image, the rest should be real people coming to the photoblog page you provide as a link.

I hope this is an improvement. As usual any comments or suggestions are welcome.

I don’t really know what to call this, it is brand new so at the moment is called the gallery.

This was added in direct response to a suggestion received by e-mail (Thanks again Graeme) who made the very fine point that photographers like to see photographs, which makes a lot of sense.

What I have added is a gallery to search for Photospots within x miles of a UK town or City; if you want to test it try a search for 10 miles from Abingdon. Now try 5 miles.

I have kept the search very basic at the moment to test out the principle but will see how it develops.

The new page works different to other sections of the site. I won’t delve into the depths but the page lists every image and every shared photospot in the directory by default (I may change this to a random selection when the database grows bigger) including a link from each item to the website (probably photoblog) you specify when adding a new entry.

This is mostly for search engine purposes to make sure everyone is getting the appropriate level of link love back to their own sites. It is then possible to filter this down. I have also made the search show the terms in the page address to make it easier to bookmark, or link back to.

There will be an option to opt out of this image search added to each item fairly shortly and it won’t list items that are marked as private.

This is a general introductory post, four days after launch (or at least putting the site live), to give a little background, explain my intentions and say hello to anyone visiting.

Background

My name is Andy Rickmann and I have been taking photographs since December 2005 when I was bought my first decent camera as a present.

I have been building websites for ten years in one guise or another and have my own design blog / photoblog / general site over at http://www.rickmann-design.co.uk

So why this?

Fairly soon after being given my camera I realised that there were lots of sites that focussed on photographs, lots that focussed on walking, or generally being outdoors, but very few to help find places to go just to take photographs. I know many photographers like a good walk and some no doubt view the photography as an incidental bonus, but I wanted to take photographs; if that involved walking then that was fine, but I didn’t want to spend a day walking across fields and come away without some pretty good photographs.

This site has been in my head since that point.

At this stage I should say a big thanks to Pete who kept bugging me about doing stuff with Google Maps. He was right.

The Master Plan

There isn’t one really. I want to make this site as good and useful as I can with the time I have available. Which isn’t infinite. The site is written, designed, coded, and tested by just me, so things might go slow.

To make sure I didn’t spend forever tweaking I threw the site out there when it seemed to be doing everything I wanted from what I’d written and I intend to add new features, better searching, more interactive features such as commenting and rating as the needs become evident. I also didn’t want to add loads of unnecessary stuff now to fund out that no one uses it.

The moral here is that if you want something added, just tell me and I will add it to the list.

For the record here are some of the things on the list at the moment:

• Commenting, e.g. I went here and it were great.
• Rating of some variety. I’m not sure whether to add a straight scale of 1-5, or even 1-10 or to look at alternative schemes such as “good, but only in the summer”, “not what I expected”, and so on. Any thoughts?
• Show only Filter option, to only show the markers for certain tags, as well as changing their colour.
• Marker Clustering, i.e. at longer zoom levels showing one marker per x miles. I wanted to wait for this until there were enough markers to warrant it. I want to be able to play around with it to be sure it works well.
• Search by images instead of using the map (see next post)

There are a few other things but I can’t remember them all right now. I will try and put an official list up on a page somewhere a little later.

Thanks, Andy.