chrisduran.eu

This is a long needed update on the WiFi in Australia (WiAU) project. I’m stoked to be able to finally release what has been happening over the last couple on months in WiAU! You can find a very similar post on the WiAU blog as well.

The pilot site using Google Maps to display WiFi maps for Australian cities has been an amazing success – I’ve had people jumping on board and extending WiAU’s pitiful collection of a single Brisbane hotspot map to having maps for most capital cities in Australia. With the great amount of community support for WiAU from both individuals donating time to create maps and hotspots as well as other organisation such as Free Sydney Wireless giving the site a great wrap, I thought it was only fair that I give back my time and attention and improve the system.

Here is a list of things that I’ve implemented over the last month or so:

A completely custom engine

The new engine is run (mostly) on WiAU’s server (with the exception of the tiling engine, which is run on the OSM servers). In fact, WiAU is now implemented entirely without the use of Google Maps.

The pilot system was, in essence, a site for listing a bunch of Google Maps that had locations marked for hotspots. There were a bunch of conventions defined, such as particular coloured markers for the type of hotspot on offer. This method was cumbersome however and required people to have a Google account to edit and add maps.

I hope that the new engine is a little easier to get up and running and is hopefully a little more intuitive.

Open maps, open access, OpenSource

After using OpenSteetMap for a little while, I realised that the maps for WiAU are essentially the map equivalent of a wiki page, having a Wiki-esque access style. Absolutely anyone can view maps and any registered user can add, edit, delete or otherwise change maps and markers – there are no access level restrictions, no moderators and no user caste-systems.

Given the above stype, the maps on WiFi in Australia are completely open – and so I thought that the underlying technology should also be. All maps on WiFi in Australia are based on two fantastic open source mapping technologies:

• The OpenLayers mapping interface,
• using OpenStreetMap as its geographical layer.

Rich formatting using standardised markup

Descriptions for markers and maps are entered using WikiCreole, a standardised wiki markup language. By using a simple-to-learn markup it is easy to include rich formatting, links, tables and even images in your marker descriptions.

Using WikiCreole is great, as users don’t need to know or even have any knowledge of HTML to create nicely formatted hotspot descriptions! They just need to know the very simple creole-markup to create richly formatted descriptions. Also, when entering the description users can pop open a cheatsheet for the markup which is really handy.

Beta and the old maps

Now for the other side. The new system is currently in beta – WiAU has grown into a complicated beast and as such it is inevitable that there might still be a few little bugs hanging around. Also, the new maps are currently unpopulated with the markers that users have added to the old maps – this is due to technical and licensing issues with accessing the old data. Also, hotspots that are added give credit to the contributor – I don’t want to take any credit for the work and contributions of others!

If you want to access the old maps, they are still able to be reached by visiting http://<mapname>.wifi-in-australia.com/ (replacing <mapname> with the city or region of the map).

Oh, and for comparison, the new URL structure for maps is http://www.wifi-in-australia.com/map/<mapname>.

Finally, thanks again to everybody who has taken part in the project so far – I look forward to your continued support, contributions and (hopefully less of this last one) bug reports! Also, any feedback on the interface and engine are always welcomed and appreciated!

Filed under: Projects by Chris