On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 05:28:34AM -0500, IvorW wrote:
[Christopher Schmidt wrote:]
Many users don't have the ability to install systemwide perl modules, and users like me who don't know perl don't know how to set up the guide to point to a local directory. I think that a self-contained package for OG including all the perl modules which the app needs, and a preset use lib() pointing to a relative directory, would be the most useful thing that OG could do to ease installation.
Maybe PAR is an option. I am successfully using PAR at work. http://search.cpan.org/~autrijus/PAR
I'd like to second this after seeing Ivor's recent presentation about Perl packaging systems at the London Perl Workshop[0]. A PAR file would not only contain all the prerequisites, but Perl Itself. As I understand it, it's a self-extracting zip archive that just runs like an executable. This might work for users who only have shell access. (Although I'm not addressing the issue of setting up the database. Thoughts anyone?)
Right now, OpenGuides feels very much like a UK-centric project. Dom is doing work to correct this, learning about projections and so on.
For which my thanks, and to Kake too for originally sorting out this business with ellipsoids, the mathematics of which I admit is largely beyond me at this point.
a good goal would be to reach out to other global users and try and find guide admins.
I'd also like to try and convince people with "non-OpenGuides Open Guides" (that is to say, who are running a city guide on something like Mediawiki) to Think Differently and Switch (erm...) but that's not going to be easy without whizbang. :)
Talking of attracting people, people who have guides need to pimp^H^Htch to potential users. For a long time I've been meaning to, but never got around to, printing leaflets and stickers for the Open Guide to London. How else can we publicize our guides? Snappy web buttons and banners?
- New Data Format support - I'm thinking something along the lines of providing JSON data interface as well as RDF, to possibly improve the integration with other web or non-web applications.
Data formats are good. Having seen your JSON export, we might as well do a YAML export too since it's similar enough. Why YAML? I don't know really, just in case someone has a cool app that uses it. (I admit that this is a slippery slope!)
I don't know what else is considered Whizbang, but I think those could be neat to take advantage of some of the "OMG AJAX" movement going on in the web world today.
I'd qite like to see OG running under mod-perl.
That'd certainly be whizbang for server admins, anyway. :) Bob showed me some benchmarking output which seems to indicate about 99% of runtime is getting the pre-reqs up and running. But this is another thread in the making, I think.
[0] http://london.pm.org/lpw/talks/2005/ivor_williams-packaging_apps.tar.gz
Cheers,
Earle.
On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Earle Martin wrote:
- New Data Format support - I'm thinking something along the lines of providing JSON data interface as well as RDF, to possibly improve the integration with other web or non-web applications.
Data formats are good. Having seen your JSON export, we might as well do a YAML export too since it's similar enough. Why YAML? I don't know really, just in case someone has a cool app that uses it. (I admit that this is a slippery slope!)
ive always had plans to create templates to create wml for phones. just need to find the tuits. while thinking about this we should also do cut down xhtml versions for those phones which only do that. since quite frankly if you are on your phone theres only so much info you need :)
On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 09:10:24PM +0000, Bob Walker wrote:
ive always had plans to create templates to create wml for phones. just need to find the tuits. while thinking about this we should also do cut down xhtml versions for those phones which only do that. since quite frankly if you are on your phone theres only so much info you need :)
If we can add full content to the RDF output, then this should be easy to do with XSLT.* Of course, though, then we get to add XML::XSLT to our list of pre-requisites!
* Yes, I volunteer.
Earle Martin wrote:
Talking of attracting people, people who have guides need to pimp^H^Htch to potential users. For a long time I've been meaning to, but never got around to, printing leaflets and stickers for the Open Guide to London. How else can we publicize our guides? Snappy web buttons and banners?
Speaking as a guide admin who doesn't have to deal with installation and hosting issues (ta Jimbo), here are the thoughts I've had about encouraging people to get involved with the Open Guide to Manchester.
- There's a large user base on LiveJournal in the Manchester community who know an awful lot about interesting quirky places in Manchester, the kind of places I'd like to see in OGM. Getting these people involved in OGM would be easier if OpenGuides had OpenID support, so we could tie edits to OpenID identities. This would make problems with spam and abuse easier to deal with from an admin perspective, but also be a Shiny Feature (tm).
- Similarly, more images would be nice, which really needs a better interface than people e-mailing their images to admin@openguides.org and having me do ImageMagick-fu manually.
- For meatspace pimping, I was thinking of having business cards printed up with some suitably abstract text like "This place is featured in the Open Guide to Manchester" and the URL of the site. That way I can just put them (with permission) in every pub etc. that's featured in the Guide.
- Closer integration to other community-contributed, geographically-oriented sites like upcoming.org and openstreetmap.org - if we could encourage the OSM guys to implement a good enough API that OpenGuides could do the same with their data as we're doing with Google Maps, that would be great. I'd love to get involved with OSM but I don't own a GPS.
Dave
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Bob Walker -
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Earle Martin