HCMC Blogs

I have dynamically injected features to a single vector layer working now, and can store EPSG:4326 co-ordinates in an array and transform them on the fly to EPSG:900913 co-ordinates. I've settled on some form of JSON to pass the arrays (from the DB) to the map, as it appears to be the easiest way to add the array to my existing layer. Using anything else requires contortions or its own layer. The downside of GeoJSON seems to be that it doesn't seem to have the ability to store info like titles and links (CDATA, basically). I can make up my own, but...

I'm now working on a development version of the DB so I don't blow anything up.
Docs here should provide some info for creating the polygons.
Questions: in our case am I working with actual polygons or can I get away with a delimited set of coordinates?
I'm not using MySQL to determine things like area or length, so is using the spatial extensions a waste of time?

I have produced 3 poster boards this week, with a fourth on the way. Here is a quick rundown on each.

1. Splash Poster: this is, more or less, a logo-only poster, that showcases the project name, intention, and years of coverage [incomplete].

2. Despatches by Numbers: lists some key numbers association with the project thus far, such as how many images produced, instances of various things, years covered in the collection, and so on [draft complete].

3. What's in a Despatch: anatomy of a typical letter, which points out--with pictures and connector-lines--details such as the despatch number, salute, marginalia, and more. The intention here is for the viewer to get a quick sense of the intricacy and minutia of the handwritten letters [draft complete].

4. What's in a Digital Despatch: as above, but the digital version. This will give viewers a sense of how we "transform" the handwritten letter into something you can "interact" with on the web. It shows some of the basic features of the site, such as the navigation bar [draft complete].

5. The Despatch Maps: this page is yet to be designed, but it will function as above (see 3 and 4) to show viewers the things they can expect to do and find with respect to our online maps [incomplete].

6. The Douglas Collage: this is a bit of fun, and a way to show the viewer the sheer volume of the letters available. It will feature a collage of images built from the images in the collections [in process].

Leaving a little early to try to burn off some of these G&T hours.

Working on the second of the Spanish maps, from 1779, I had only a few items to mark up, but a huge amount of quite interesting research to do. I eventually discovered, from some web research and parsing through the lengthy Spanish caption, that the longitude readings on the map are relative not to Greenwich but to San Blas (see this ref, which helped to figure out the range of the map. I also identified a few places that were previously mysterious, including Punta de los Mártires (Point Grenville, Washington State), Entrada de Hezeta (apparently the Columbia River delta), and Las tres Marias (now Islas Marías, Nayarit, Mexico). RS from Hispanital has helped me a lot with the transcriptions.

Did a bit of research for the next map, which I haven't started yet: it seems that Friendly Bay is now Yuquot, and Scott's Bay may be Eagle Bay (or may not), and is probably in Barkley Sound. More work to do there.

Added several more logos to the credits page, some of which had to be pieced together from component parts.

Did a QT update, but the issue still remains: "source_parent was not valid", in either filterAcceptsRow or filterAcceptsColumn of HcmcIdFilter. I'll probably need to re-read all the documentation on QSortFilterProxyModel...

I finished adding brief notes that can be expanded later to the notes element in the names file.

In order to be consistant and only mark up proper nouns:

• I changed berserks to a simple keyword item without xml:id etc. in: SKng-1899-Oslo-040-01-vgNet.xml
• I changed valkyries to a simple keyword item without xml:id etc. in: SKng-1899-Oslo-138-01-vgNet

I added a patronym to the title in: SKng-1899-Oslo-163-01.xml

I've completed an example page the demos most of the features we'll need. I've rendered everything as vectors on a single layer, and abandoned the import of KML (see my previous post).
Arrays for lines and polygons are currently static and are embedded in the page itself.
Next task is to determine the best way of generating them and passing them via ajax to the page. I'm looking in to the options: GeoJSON, GML, GeoRSS and Well Known Text.

Worked with SA to model the db structure, and then to build the GUI component for the rather large documents table. Added four new one-to-many fields which replace existing plain-text comma-delimited fields. SA will now run some SQL against the db to parse out the data from the old fields, and create links in the relation tables.