
I just finished the second LA DESPEDIDA projectpage. After the first journey's success in summer of 2010, this time, i left my hometown Hamburg in northern Germany to move to Canary Island. Within one month, another small repair pit-stop and thousands of Kilometers on the PIAGGIO APE three wheeler everything went fine.
Check the projects website at
http://www.la-despedida.com/2013 for the whole waypoint blog.
Though that page exists, i am said to have to inform you that this time, the idea of the project was not realized. The concept was to create GIF animations while on my way and combine them to a three hour movie that will be aired while djing techno music live to iit.
There are several reasons why i did not make this come true: on the one hand the first week was very depressive. Driving daily through a dark, cold German landscape in a car that does not realy comes with a heater, made me wish to drive right into the next tree.
Everything changed the more i drove south and the further the APE drove, the more content i collected. But Fortuna kicked me in the ass this time. Days after arriving on Canary Island i had to realize that mostly all of the stuff that i had collected dissappeared in the trashbin. It was the second sign on this journey offering a hint like "not this time".
In other words: all that you can find on the website is all what left from my digital camera and the Samsung Chromebook that i used as storage device. There are no movies left, no flyers, no brochures, no names of persons met as the papers, books, SD cards with the content is gone.
So what is the result of all of this!?I do not give up. This in mind i realized the projects webpage that took me about four weeks to finalize because of the ideas that i wanted to implement. The next paragraphs will be some kind of manual or instruction to those of you whot someday want to present their journey to friends and family or publish such a travel blog with google maps.
TASKI wanted to develop a website where people can click through NEXT and PREVIOUS buttons to travel through waypoints of the journey. These waypoints shall appear on google maps, as exact as possible.
To archive this, i need a GPS tracking app for my Android phone and to sync the time of that phone with the date and time of my DSLR camera.
This way, when later viewing the camera photos, i can see when exactly that certain photo was taken. So what i only need to do, is to check the GPS tracking file (.kml or .kmz) at the GPS LatLong position with the time the photo was taken.
1. Create the HTML page and insert the Google map.Months ago i realized that by now there are several jQuery plugins for scriptkids like me to make it easy t implement a Google map and its features inside a webpage. What the plugin must come with for this project is the possibility to
- insert a KML file that shows the path of my journey
- insert makers that can be customized
- insert overlays, preferable in HTML
These three features work all great with gMap3 (
www.gmap3.net) - the plugin is very easy to understand as long as you know a bit about javascript programming. What i do but only a very very very bit.
By now i had the page with a map. Not more. I played a bit with the plugin and easily found out how to make markers appear and how to create overlays with the photos or HTML content inside it.
The plugins documentation and the forum is awesome and as most of my hurdles where answered there, within two weeks i had everything set up correctly.
If you check the source code of the projects webpage, you will see exactly what i did. As i did not wanted to have a repetetive code, i put the markers and overlays into an array devided by "|". Each arrays entry is then split up so that i can call every item through its own variable and insert it at the proper position where i want it.
It's not that complicated but through the bookmarks i made and what i learned from these techniques in hope that it might be of any help to the one or another of you. So here we go...
gMap3as mentioned above one of the best and easiest plugins to implement Google maps and its features inside a website.
www.gmap3.netStackoverflow: Hot to cear specific marker...It took me days to find out why a specific marker with a certain tag or ID would not be cleared. I evend thought about the JS disable or enable feature but nothing worked out until i found this example!
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7589953/how-to-clear-specific-marker-with-gmap3
Google KML trainingThe official KML documentation at Google is absolutely perfect. Apart of one fact: i could not find anywhere the information that the KML file has to be online, uploaded to the server. I tried to implement it offline, in other words locally as i was scrippting everything on my pc and not on the remote server. It never worked until i uploaded the KML file to my server and set the link to there.
https://developers.google.com/kml/trainingGPS VisualizerThe GPS tracking was recorded via Google MyTracks on my Android phone. So for every time that i started the app, it generated a KML file tracking my position on this planet every 10 seconds. These files could be put all together into one and at the same time manipulated via the GPS Visualizer website.
http://www.gpsvisualizer.comMapsmaniacIf you want to stay up to date about the latest Google Maps bezerker features and what people develop with the Google service then you should subscribe to the Mapsmaniac Blog. Here i found some inspirations about usability and why my idea is not as user-friendly as it should. But i want it that way to calm people down and turn every waypoint step by step. But you will find tons of fabulous ideas and projects here!
http://www.mapsmaniac.com
MyTracks
This app is simply awesome in case that you want to track your route. It might not be that glossy in design and might not have tons of features but for a simple recording it is perfect. You press the record button, activate the GPS on your phone and there you go. The only bad thing i could find was that the KML files get quite big by time and are saved to the phones drive. After the record you can export them to the SD card to free some memory, but that step imho is the one too much.
http://play.google.comSo by now this LA DESPEDIDA journey is finished and though i am ready for the next trip and already got an idea, i do need some time to reflect about to wich level i want to bring it on for the next time.
Until then i want to thank everyone for helping me out - in my real and my virtual life.
Visit the projects website at
http://www.la-despedida.com/2013