July and August is a very slow time for me this year as there aren’t any conferences I am speaking at and no hack days planned. September will be packed again, though.

This is why I am right now planning to do some brown bag presentations in the London area. I’ve already been at IPC media, will go next Friday to ebay/gumtree/skype/paypal/shopping.com in Richmond and have had Sky and Thomson Group/TUI show some interest on twitter.

Brown bag presentations are by definition talks during lunch break where people can bring their food along. That way your employees can get some information or discuss their issues with an invited expert without disruption of your normal office hours and times.

I’d be happy to come around and give a talk on all the things I am passionate about. Currently these things are:

• Opening your own and reaching data on the web easily with YQL
• Mining your content and enhancing it with geographical information (Yahoo Placemaker)
• Building specialist search engines (BOSS)
• Accessibility and that it is not magic
• Professional Web Development
• Performance of web products and how to improve it

I am open to other topics, though.

If you are interested in some of that and you are in the Oyster card area, comment here or contact me on Twitter and we can talk date, location, topic and time. I don’t expect any pay, but normally a coffee, some water and a sandwich :). The whole idea of the exercise is to be able to reach developers that normally do not get the chance to go to conferences.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Naughty photos with the people removed is just not the same
• Panic has a 3 day half-price sale on Transmit, Coda, Candybar and Unison and even a corny commercial for it (you gotta love the Kleenex)
• The German mail released a pretty cool collaborative magazine creator in Flash – in German of course.
• The sales of this 3 Wolves howling at the moon T-shirt allegedly went up 2300% after the fake overly excited comments started.
• Simon Willison creates geocoders – a meta geocoder using three different APIs under the hood
• Keyboard cat the true Internet story gives us all the info about keyboard cat. Now let’s bury it.
• More videos: Transforminators mashup, Damien Walters show reel (parcours, free running – also read the hilarious b3ta comments and check his terrible myspace profile and Bach Bach revolution – Two women play Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on a giant piano.
• Good quote “Direct HTML input is the autobahn to invalid XHTML.” -Carl Camera

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Browser testing overlord Peter-Paul Koch has a support of CSS in mobile devices table that is full of win
• I did not know that there are hard-core knitters out there. Reminds me of Monty Python’s Hell’s Grannies
• Moby has free music for film makers
• Natalie Downe has a nifty CSS3 style sheet to turn documents into foldable books
• Did you know that Mona Lisa was a firefighter?
• I like things that are what they say on the tin: Explosions and boobs
• Check out the original Star Wars scripts to see where it all went wrong

I am right now very excited about the new Placemaker beta – a location extraction web service released at Where2.0. Using Placemaker you can find all the geographical locations in a feed or a text or a web url and you get them back as an array of places.

As a demo I took the Yahoo News feed and ran it through Placemaker. The resulting places are plotted on a map and the map moves from location to location when you hover over the news items.

The result is online at http://isithackday.com/hacks/placemaker/map.php

Getting the data from the data feed and running it through placemaker is very straight forward. I explained the basic principle in this blog post on the Yahoo Developer Network blog. The only thing to think about is to define the input and output types correctly:

If you look at the source of this example you will find that Placemaker injected contentlocation elements in the feed itself:

2514815

38.8913
-77.0337


23424793

21.511
-77.8068


23424977

48.8907
-116.982


55843872

19.9445
-75.1541

You’ll also notice that the elements are namespaced and the names of the locations in CDATA blocks, both things I hate with a passion. Not because they don’t make sense, but because simplexml can be drag to make understand them.

What I wanted to do with this data was twofold: create a JSON array of geo locations to plot on a map and a display of the news content. This is the PHP that does that:

$places = simplexml_load_string($results, 'SimpleXMLElement',
LIBXML_NOCDATA);
// if there are elements found
if($places->channel->item){
// start a JSON array
$output .= '[';
// start the HTML output
$html = '
';
// set the counter - this will be needed to link news
// items and map markers
$count = 0;
// loop over RSS items
foreach($places->channel->item as $p){
// set inner counter (as there are more locations per news item)
$innercount = 0;
// start the HTML list item and give it an ID with the counter
// value
$html .=  '
children('http://wherein.yahooapis.com/v1/cle');
// check that there is a location sub-element in this item
if($locs->contentlocation){
// if there is one, add a class to the LI
$html .= ' class="haslocation"';
// start an array for displaying of the locations under the
// news items
$dlocs = array();
// loop over all the places found for this item
foreach($locs->contentlocation->place as $pl){
// append a new JS object with the location data
// and a unique ID to the locations array
$locations[] = '{name.'","title" title="">name":"'.
preg_replace('/n+/','',addslashes($p->title)).
'",latitude" title="">lat.
'",longitude.'","id":"m" title="">lon'.
$count.'x'.$innercount.'"}';
// add the location name to the display locations array
$dlocs[] = $pl->name;
// increase the inner count to ensure that every marker has
// a unique ID
$innercount++;
}
}
// append the HTML for the news item
$html.='>
'.$p->title.'
'.
$p->description.'
';
// if locations were found, add them
if(sizeof($dlocs)>0){
$html.='
Locations: '.join(',',$dlocs).'
';
}
// end the list item
$html.='
';
// increase the counter
$count++;
}
// join the json object data with a comma and close the JSON array
$output .= join(',',$locations);
$output .= ']';
// if there are no items simply return nothing
} else {
$output = '';
}
// and this ends the HTML
$html.= '
';
?>

The result of this can be seen here http://isithackday.com/hacks/placemaker/map-2.php.

The JavaScript to show the map is pretty straight forward and more or less the demo example of the maps API:

// will be called with the array assembled in PHP
function placeonmap(o){
// if there are locations
if(o.length > 0){
// create a new geopoints array to hold all locations
// this is needed to determine the original zoom
// level of the map
var geopoints = [];
// add map with controls
var map = new YMap(document.getElementById('map'));
map.addZoomLong();
map.addPanControl();
// loop over locations
for(var i=0;i);

That’s pretty much it. I am sure it can be refined, but it is amazing how easy it is to get geo information into any text with Placemaker.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The Sorry Jinho group on flickr that I set up to say sorry to a colleage who had his camera with photos of the british museum stolen already has 113 photos! Thanks, folks!
• The tweeting cat door is a wonderfully geeky hack that only makes a cat flap functional when one of the two house cats approach (RFID in the collar) and tweets every time they leave the house or come into it – this could work with kids!
• Goths in hot weather is another blog that is what it says on the tin
• The historic tale construction kit allows you to paint stories in Bayeux tapestry style
• The star trek movie recognition chart does make trivia much easier
• A cool collection of WWII propaganda posters
• A pretty cool pixel art meets real life video mashup
• I now finally know the correct translation of All Your Base