Insomnia is the mother of invention, so I made some updates to Landmarker, my web mapping and tagging site for Second Life.
Before, the map was the most coolest part, enough that I wrote a post just about how I did it. So now the first page you see is the map, and the map is now full screen. (The map pane can naturally take up the full width with CSS, but like Google Maps, I have to calculate the proper height and set it directly in JavaScript.) I also removed the list below the map, which is problematic: if you click to the map for somewhere, you can't get to a secondlife: link for it anymore. I'll probably add a list_lm mode next time I touch it, and link the landmark icons to that; it's factored enough that should take only a couple minutes.
There were a couple other small Ajax pieces before, but they couldn't compete with the map for coolness. However, I added some new ones that might come close. The lesser of these is I completed the Atom posting piece I mentioned in the previous article. If you set your Atom username and endpoint on the "Your account" page, you'll get an "Atom password" field when you edit landmarks. When you fill that in, Landmarker will try to post the landmark to the given Atom sink. It only puts the location in the link so far, though, so it's not useful for much other than TypeLists, I guess. You can see a one-item list on my blog, though.
The cooler addition is picture suggestion. When adding landmarks, there's been a field for putting in links to pages where you can see screenshots of the landmark. There's also been a link under the Tags field to suggest tags from the list of those you've already used. Now there's a "suggest from your pictures" link under the Pictures field. It uses your Flickr and/or Snapzilla pictures (you have to go to the "Your account" page to enter your Flickr username, and get directions on claiming your SL name, which the Snapzilla lookup uses).
The cool part is how it works. Flickr has an API, sure--it's just a call to flickr.people.getPublicPhotos once you look up the NSID for the username. (I do that when you save the username; I go ahead and do a flickr.people.getInfo too, so I can get the iconserver and show your Flickr user icon on the Your Account form.) Snapzilla doesn't explicitly have an API... but surprise, it has an implicit one, per-user RSS feeds! So I can get both lists with RESTian GETs; I put proxy rules in httpd.conf, do all the processing on the client side with Ajax, and voilà.
Neither helps me personally, as I put my shots in a blog. It should be merely a matter of adding general processing of images out of RSS and Atom feeds, though. In JavaScript. EH-HE-HE. *twitch*
I still don't have a Mac but Cienna told me the site works well in Safari, which is a bit of a surprise. It shouldn't be a surprise, I guess, as I'm not doing any weird CSS or JavaScript. It's all basic DOM and XMLHttpRequest, and Safari seems to handle that well. Neat.
In conclusion, here's Landmarker v2. Thanks to Arito for the new title image, a fucked-up sleeping schedule for the inclination, and Cienna for the original idea (and prototype in-game gadget, which will be the next completed Landmarker component and boring to 90% of you).
