Back at Where 2.0 2006 today, with some more interesting presentations going on. The OSGeo guys described their cool MapBender and GeoServer. Both of them use the OGC's OpenGIS standards to provide UI or data sources respectively.
It was a great presentation, but most important for me was a demo of using GeoServer to provide KML data to Google Earth. That's where it hit me: Wikitravel fits into the geospatial Web as a source of geographical feature information -- data about points on the map, like museums, restaurants, etc. People could use that data in whatever interface system they wanted.
The last talk before the break was Chris Spurgeon's great discussion of the 5 Best Geohacks of All Time. Great discussion of how we got to where we are today, knowing where we are today. Fascinating stuff and it sure puts trying to figure out Google APIs into perspective.
tags: where2.0 osgeo ogc google earth wikitravel
Stupid Google Toolbar
So I installed the Google Toolbar update from a few days ago, and it's been truncating my MediaWiki uploads, so that I'm cutting the articles I work on in half. It's embarrassing and stupid. I've uninstalled the Toolbar, and it's doubtful I'll try it again. See this MediaWiki bug for the full info.
tags: google toolbar broken corrupt mediawiki grrrrr
Venezuela and Linux
I'm surprised to see that the Venezuelan government is training somewhere between 400K and 2M people in using Linux as a desktop system. This blog entry in Spanish has more details. Very cool.
tags: venezuela linux training
Wikitravel in the news
There was an interesting blog entry Maj found through Technorati about microformatting Wikitravel. Sounds like I'm not tooooo far off with ideas about putting this kind of machine-readable data into the browser. Yay.
On a more national level, USA Today mentioned Wikitravel in an article titled "Website designers want searches to work for free". It's about... search engine optimization. Gah! Apparently a Wikitravel user, User:DrakesTravels, has been selling his SEO service to the Durango (Colorado) Chamber of Commerce. To be fair, he's added some valuable information about the city, and the Chamber's Web site is a fair link per our rules about Wikitravel:external links. And any publicity is good publicity. Buuuuuuuut... please don't use Wikitravel for SEO. Please.
tags: wikitravel usatoday media blogs seo microformats
What's in a .name?
So, I've had about 5-6 different personal domains over the years. I registered prodromou.name and evanprodromou.name last year, and I'm really happy with them. It's good to have a TLD that's specifically for individuals' names. It's nice and clear.
However, I've noticed a lot of sloppily programmed email-address parsers that don't recognize evan@prodromou.name as a valid email address. I think this is pretty stupid. The time when you could determine a valid email address with a small number of TLDs is long past. Too many new TLDs are getting created yearly to make this a valuable practice.
Tip to programmers: if you are going to do a round-trip email confirmation anyways, there's no value in doing regexp validation of the email address input. All you're doing is turning away potential customers -- an extremely bad idea.
tags: domain dotname email validation