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

I haven’t updated this blog for a few weeks, which is my bad. I’ve updated my project sites even less frequently, which is badder! I’m off on a surf trip this extended weekend starting after I hit submit, so I’ll have a lot of time to talk about what has been happening RE projects next week. I’m also going to take loads of photos with my Geo-tagging Blackberry (a cool feature I discovered it had) and see if I can use it to construct some sort of travel map. Especially hopefully using OSM (see below)

Lately, I’ve been in discovery mode and found a lot of ‘new’ toys. OpenStreetMap is probably my favourite new toy(guess why) and also openSUSE and the stable version of Processing is amazing.

I’m also really getting my hands dirty with techie things like Python, Javascript, JSON, AJAX, message digests, etc. Web development in the Web 2.0 world is damn fun.

Oh and I have a security patch looming, apparently.

Projects, in brief

Cognicology:

• I have a couple of articles in the pipeline for Cognicology, that will be up next week.

• Alborz is back from Europe in about nine or ten days, and we are finalising a really exciting product to coincide with the official launch of Cognicology, which is coming up soon… I’m pretty excited about this, and more to come about it as the due date impends…

WiFi in Australia:

• I have some really exciting and major developments with regards to WiFi in Australia… The key though is open = better. Always.

PhD:

• Tomorrow marks the first day of my final year… Or the beginning of the end of this saga. There is a bucket load of work to be done, but I am definitely on track and am confident about a timely completion.

• I have three 1st name peer-reviewed articles out there in the world now… You can find them on my publications page

Looks likely I will be heading to San Diego in January next year for the Plant and Animal Genome conference. Should be a great opportunity to drink coronas and meet greats in the field (probably not in that order). It will be my first trip to the states, and that will be ace.

I’ve noticed Alborz has a bit of a projects page on his blog, I think I am going to have to steal that idea…

Filed under: general by Chris

The Wifi-in-Australia project has had its first major external development. Earlier in the week, I was contacted by Josh Liebmann, who has been generous enough to donate some of his time to start up a Sydney wireless hotspot map for WiFi in Australia.

Josh is a twitter user, and found out about the project by the wifi-in-australia twitter page.

I’ve been pretty amazed by how this project has really taken off using twitter and I think really shows how powerful twitter currently is as a social media marketing tool. I’ve been actively maintaining both a Facebook Group for the project, and a twitter page. I started pushing the facebook group about 3 weeks ago, and pushing the Twitter page about 2 weeks ago.

The facebook group has a little less then 100 members, whilst the WiFi in Australia now has around 150 followers on Twitter (and this number is very literally growing DAILY, averaging an extra 10 followers a DAY). Interestingly though, 30% of the traffic comes from facebook, compared to around 20% of the traffic coming from twitter. Despite this, most of the community activity on Wifi in Australia has originated from the Twitter followers.

There are a few possible reasons for this. The most likely (to me at least) is that I believe the twitter followers of WiFi in Australia represent a slice of the online community that have a greater interest in Wireless internet (and computing culture in general) then their facebook cousins. This is in no small part due to many of the Twitter followers coming from the follower list of freeAusWireless.

Any other ideas of why this might be the case? Throw your theories at me!

Filed under: IT, social media by Chris

I’ve just launched a new website, wifi-in-australia.com. It is essentially a collection of (hopefully) useful maps annotated with WiFi hotspots. The maps are created using the google maps interface, and are completely user-driven and user-moderated. As much as I would love to say this is entirely my idea, it isn’t. This site is a direct homage to Neil Cocker’s website, www.wifi-in-uk.co.uk. I first found the UK version when reading Jane’s blog. The idea really rung a chord with me. I really like the concept of having WiFi maps that span a wide-variety of locations, are editable buy everyone and anyone, yet are uniform in their behaviour and representation of information. Unfortunately, I’ve been out of the UK for over 2 years now, so I thought I would bring the idea local.

The general premise is that using google maps, somebody (me, you, that guy over there.. anybody!) creates a publically editable map. This map serves as a WiFi map for a given location. The creator and the general public can then go to town and add landmarks for their favourite wireless hotspots. The Google Maps Interface allows people to choose from a variety of landmark markers. For a wireless map, the convention that has been adopted is that GREEN markers denote free WiFi locations, BLUE denotes paid for WiFi locations and YELLOW denotes WiFi that has access restrictions (i.e. membership of an organisation or group is required for login access). Unfortunately URLs for user-created Google Maps are about as beautiful as Gordon Brown having a good hair day. Because of this unfortunate fact, the final step is to give the map a friendly URL. This can be done a number of ways, including giving each map a unique domain (such as www.wifi-in-oxford.co.uk or www.wifi-in-cardiff.co.uk – this is Neil’s model), or giving each map a subdomain (such as brisbane.wifi-in-australia.com – my model).

I’m really excited about the possibilities of these projects, and am interested to see how they develop!

Filed under: IT by Chris