Category: Web Development

Singletrack’s Latest Issue

Updated the Mag Archive over the weekend. Well kind of. Not sure if I can make life a lot easier for myself somehow. Life has been considerably easier since Mark started publishing electronic copies of the contents on Singletrackworld. Using this as a basis, I add in extra details and list the bikes and kit tested. Edit the text, format it in HTML and post it up. Update the Google Maps file for the route guides section and that’s the easy bit done and that’s as far as I’ve taken things with the latest two issues.

The question is how to develop things from here. What I’d like is some way of taking the lists of kit tested and bikes reviewed and adding them into the database as individual entries (would be useful in developing the site further with links to individual reviews, etc). This will of course mean they need to be appropriately categorised, but with this approach rather than manually maintaining lists, the system would be doing it. Of course I want to do this and try to keep the existing page format but that just maight not be possible. Mmm. Food for thought.

Anyway until I migrate the rest of the bikes in the Owners’ Club to the new site I’m not taking on anything more in terms of web development. After the migration, I need to get the online shop sorted out too… I was stoked to see that one of my shots from the summers riding made it into the Issue 38 as the contents picture. Nice.

WordPress from Scratch

Until now I’ve never had to do a base install of WordPress. I’ve always previously used the CPanel Scripts Library utility to do the job, but then there have been some issues with that. So this weekend needing to get some development work done, I’ve decided to put WordPress’ famous claim of a five minute install to the test.

I’m a staunch supporter of the concept of Open Source software and I can’t help thinking that WordPress must be one of the most broadly used and accessible systems out there. The fact that it just works, you don’t need to pay expensive maintenance and development fees, that such a huge range of plug-ins to expand it exist and that something that’s free knocks the socks of things that cost thousands is just great.

Back to that claim… The result is that even over a 10Mb connection (no contention, direct to a 1Gb fibre switch and then to the Internet), it’s a lot more than a five minute job. Just uploading the files that make up the latest WordPress installation (v2.2.2) is not far off a ten minute job.

That said once you’ve worked out the prefixes that the SQL database and username need to work on the hosting server, following the WordPress installation steps is easy. Basically all you have to do is setup a username and password for the blog to get you started – although you’ll probably want to lose the default admin username once you’re logged in.

Google Maps API

I’ve been wanting to get to grips with the Google Maps application for sometime because the geographer in me recognises it not only as a useful tool, but a spatial data godsend. I’ve been using Google Earth for sometime, but Google Maps lets you do some cool stuff. After trying a few different plugins that utilise the Google Maps API, I’ve decided to use Avi Alkalays version to develop the Singletrack Magarchive website.

I’ve long recognised that my previous method of illustrating the various locations of Singletrack’s route guides had limitations. The largest being the poor spatial resolution a fairly big marker on a smallish map had. Google Maps gets around that with its use of scalable vector data and geocoded tags. Better still each of the marker point tags can be customised to include images and hyper links.

This means that every time you click on one of the markers in the new route guide section you get the details of the route and a link to the magazine page in the archive. I’ve added in the Singletrack Office location too. I’m hoping that this new approach will also solve the second concern I had – In places like Calderdale and the Peak and Lake Districts, some of the points were so close together that they were quite off the mark. I’m pleased with the end result and will be applying this to some websites at work.

There’s a few things I’d like to be able to tweak, least not being able to number each of the marker points rather than just have a black dot in them. I’ll have to get to grips with the Mapplets documentation first, but I think it’s do-able. Here’s a quick demo:

Phew!

I’ve been putting off an unsavory job for some time, namely upgrading my WordPress version from 2.0. I’ve procrastinated on the matter for so long that I’ve been able to move to version 2.2.1 now and very nice it is too. Well aside from the snazzy interface elements of the GUI there is some nice bits of new code that let the me do more dynamic site content with less code. It’s ace.

The biggest visible change to the site is the new photos section. I’ve spent a large portion of the day trying to get the Photo Album plug-in working. I’m glad to say it’s been a success, so there’s a bit of polishing to be done, but essentially all the gallery photos will now be migrating to Flickr since I opted into their Flickr Pro scheme. It’ll make my life a lot easier in terms of adding pictures in future and save me a lot of time in manually coding HTML and creating galleries.