Made a geoblog, the demo is here: http://dev.zhannes.com. Built a CRUD app that works as a blog and geotracker-ish. This idea started out because I get asked for directions a lot. I had the idea to create a mobile app that would let me record where I was and the directions I gave. Then I realized that’d get pretty boring quick. So I looked into general geo-javascript-stuff and had fun with it. The server side code is written in the ruby “microframework”, Sinatra. Lots more enhancements to make. I need to add a css layout, a map/blog icon, and maybe hook this up to some yelp/twitter/4sq APIs. What else..? probably need text formatting. Also planning to use the iUI JavaScript framework so I can use this app from my iphone.
Components
- Free template: by Terrafirma2
- Language: Ruby
- Framework-ish: Sinatra
- Libraries:
- ERB (embedded ruby) for the views
- Date
- Database: Sqlite3
- ORM: ActiveRecord
- JavaScript: jQuery,Google Maps API (Map and Geocoder for Addresses. Streetview)
- Banner Graphic: Created with free icons and GIMP
Options table
Made an options table so i can enter pieces of content that don’t need to be blog posts. E.g., tagline, sidebar, etc. You can put HTML in there or whatever.
Javascript & Google Maps
To detect the current location (semi-accurate), the JavaScript uses a spec that is not fully supported across browsers. The snippet looks like:
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(yourFunctionName, funcIfError);
Going forward, I want to examine why the map marker is off… even though the map is centered correctly.
User Agent detection
The ruby code detects the user agent making the request and is able to serve a different layout accordingly. This is useful on the iphone, which seems to choke on the Google Maps geocoding functions, but not the map functions. I did not look into this too much, probably an error in my code. The Google Street View requires flash and would not work on the iphone anyway.
I want to change the CSS and use the iUI library for iphone javascript so it feels like an iphone web app.
