60+ registrations and some quite interesting session proposals listed at the BarCamp wiki will result in an exciting event again!
However, one thing I’d like to see more at such events is crossborder exchange: Bratislava and Györ are at a 1 hour distance, Brno is a 2 hour drive from Vienna. A BarCamp is an excellent opportunity to get in touch with a bunch of innovative people in an informal setting. I really would like to encourage everybody located in the Central European region and interested in new media and technology trends to join the unconference next weekend in Vienna. It’s worth the short travel!
It needed Macheist to point me to CSSedit. This editor is just the right combination of WYSIWYG and text editor, features live preview and CSS overwrites. All seen in Firefox’s Web Developer toolbar of course, the Swiss army knife of web development. But not with such an intuitive user interface as CSSedit offers.
If you’re sitting behind a Mac and do CSS, you should give CSSedit a try, it’s worth it!
The larger the scale, the more does this method make sense in geographic applications. I’m not so much into AutoCAD and architectural planning, but I guess in that field, head tracking offers an interersting way for project presentations. [via Bull’s Rambles]
… together with other maps of culture, archeology, architecture and art sites have been made available at the digital cultural artifact cadastre (in German language).
There are several methods to use free map services for visualizing a list of point-features. I found this wizard for instance at the gmaps samples. It uses a published Google Spreadsheets document and puts the listed features on a map. This method is a clever way because you can use Google Spreadsheets to hold, manage and edit your data and don’t have to go through the map publishing process over and over again when you update your data.
The problem with that wizard is, that you have to know the coordinates already. So it won’t help if there is just a list of addresses without coordinate information. You must geocode (assign coordinates to each address) your items before you can put them on a map with this method. And if the map should be shown somewhere else, you’ll need a Google Maps API key, which is tied to exactly one url-string.
Luckily Yahoo! invented the Pipes: I put a quick Pipe together which allows you to geocode addresses stored in a Google Spreadsheet.
Here is how it works:
Enter a list of addresses in Google Spreadsheet. Here, for instance, is a list of shops in Vienna where you can grab a free copy of biber.
The column “Name” identifies the name of my features and the column “Address” holds the address to geocode. If you want to use another structure, you should clone the pipe and adjust the Regex-module to match your needs.
Publish your Google Spreadsheet as Atom or RSS feed (click the link “More publishing options” in the “Publish” section), e.g. the biber feed
Enter the feed url into the “Google Spreadsheet feed url” field and hit “run pipe”
A Yahoo! Map showing all your (successfully geocoded) addresses should be produced
Alternatively you can take the GeoRSS feed or KML-file from the Pipe and display it in Google Earth or put it on a Google Map (and embed it into a blog post).
Yahoo! Pipes are simple, yet powerful, and I think it should be possible to modify the Pipe in order to return a table containing coordinates. There is already a JSON output by default. Regarding the geocoding limit, I’m not sure which number applies for Yahoo! Pipes.
Categories and tags in blogs are useful. They help readers filter the content. Most blogging tools, like WordPress, offer extra feeds based on categories and tags too.
As for WordPress, once the FeedBurner plugin is installed, all your tag and category pages point to the FeedBurner feed, which is the main feed, as alternate link. This behaviour is especially annoying when you try to subscribe only to a single category of a blog. Unless you’re familiar with the url-schema of the blog and know how to point your news reader exactly to the category feed, you’ll end up seeing always the main feed in your reader.
Yahoo! Pipes is very handy at that point and makes mashup and post-process syndicated data very easy. A quick developed Yahoo! Pipe helped me to find a workaround for that issue and add the tumble category to my tumblelog, where I aggregate almost every trace I leave online.
The Yahoo! Pipe is quite simple: enter a blog url and category (or tag), hit run pipe and see the blog feed filtered by the desired category (or tag). It worked for me on a WordPress feed published via FeedBurner, a Serendipity feed but had problems with a Moveable Type feed. I didn’t spend too much time figuring out what’s wrong with the Moveable Type feed, but since it’s published everyone can play around and fix it.
