savemytracks.com

Originally this site had the domain name www.savemytracks.co.uk. However, I realised today that the more general international domain name www.savemytracks.com was still available; so I registered it as an alias to this site.

This may hopefully boost the visibility of this site, although at this point the site does not yet offer any functionality to potential users ... but I hope to allow soon a limited number of users to register for testing the site. Will keep everyone posted!

Using Google Maps V3

The first step in preparing a display of the GPS location of the camera images has been implemented: in the single picture display mode, below the image a map is shown, in the instance when a GPS coordinate is available.

I have used the latest version of Google Maps, which is V3. This is supposed to work also on mobile phones - however, on Windows Mobile Internet Explorer the Google Map does not show up (same problems as with version 2), and in Opera Mobile, the whole image area did not show up (this might have to do with this area being in an IFRAME, I think that Opera does not like Iframes). So as for now, despite all my efforts on automatically resizing the web page down to mobile phone screen size, I do not have this yes working. I may have to replace the IFRAME with an Ajax method, and have to query if it is running on Windows Mobile IE - then disable the Google Maps display. Quite annoying...

Date Separator

Through more testing of the image upload, the "show all pictures" page grew even more: a total of more than 1100 pictures has been uploaded so far. The separation into several pages with a pre-defined number of images per page worked fine, but it was difficult to see the various dates.

Therefore, I added a date separator: this date separator takes the place of an image thumbnail and instead displays the date of the following pictures. It is matched in size so that the tiled display of the thumbnails is not disturbed.

Furthermore, care has been taken to ensure that this site can be viewed on a variety of screens: the browser window can be changed to a small mobile-phone type sized display, and it can be set to full size of a large display: the content will automatically assume a proper filling of the window, without the need to scroll horizontally because of cut-off content.

Number of Displayed Pictures Limited

After all my test driving the image collection had grown to more than 900 pictures. This is not suitable to show on a single page, even through thumbnails. So I wrote some PHP code which creates several pages: based on a maximum number of pictures to be shown and a start picture index, the number of displayed thumbnails is reduces to a maximum number. In order to access all pictures I wrote a small code piece which allows access of individual pages as well as previous/next page - try it out in the "Show All Pictures" page (the page numbers are on the bottom). These pages are created dynamically, based on the GET parameters in the URL (which you see when you click on one of the bottom page numbers in the "Show All Pictures" page.