MovieLandmarks

A simple missing var map declaration was causing IE to choke on the site. It is now working for all browsers I can test with (FF3, Safari, IE8, Chrome). Let me know if you find any problems with it.

After dumping app engine to return to the original PHP+MySQL based system I’ve been working hard to get all the user facing features running. Tonight I’ve finally reached the point where everything is working. You will notice that hovering over the landmarks shows ‘null’ in a lot of cases. This is because I’ve made a basic change to the system and will now have a single landmark per location with multiple movies attached to it. This means I need to go through all the landmarks and give them names that aren’t movie specific.

On the back end I still need to get movie add and editing working. Hopefully this will be working in a few days and I can start fixing up all the errors and broken youtube videos that have crept in over the last year.

You may notice that it doesn’t work with Internt Explorer. I may or may not fix this. IE always has problems with the same code that works great with FireFox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. So if you have problems viewing anything, you should be using FireFox 3 or later since that is what I use for development.

I’ve decided to go back to the PHP + MySQL version. The App Engine storage model just isn’t flexible enough for creating clusters correctly.

I just heard the news that John Hughes died from a heart attack today. He was one of the greatest writers and directors of all time, able to capture the emotion and make you feel it while watching his films. Many of the best movies I watched while growing up were John Hughes films and seeing them again remind me of the friends I went and saw them with.

He will be missed.

Adding Landmarks is now working, they just aren’t linked to anything yet and don’t show up on the map when it is reloaded. The system is also creating csquares for use in the clustering system (to be described in detail after I have it working). csquares should be a significant improvement over the clustering method I was using previously.

I have slowly been making progress on the new site at http://movielandmarks.appspot.com, I now have the movie add code working, the picker searches amazon.com for matches and displays their covers for you to pick from.

Next up is getting the add media dialog created. I think I’m going to use the http://www.oembed.com APIs from Youtube, Hulu, Flickr, etc. to manage adding the embedded media. It looks like a good standard, and it can return json, making it alot easier to parse the results.

I’ve decided to rewrite the back-end of MovieLandmarks in Python and move it over to Google’s AppEngine. This should allow me to focus on developing features for the site without having to worry (too much) about scalability and reliability of the servers it is running on. 

I have plans to re-activate user submissions for content, as well as extensive use of jQuery for the User Interface dialogs. The basic clean design will remain the same, with dialogs being used for adding and editing the content of the site.

The landmark clustering will also be rewritten from scratch in Python, with the goal to improve its speed and my understanding of how it actually works. I will be blogging about this as I work through it since Google Map object clustering seems to be a subject that alot of people are interested in.

I’ve started adding jquery to the development version. I’ll be using it for UI elements and themes.

I had an undeclared map variable which caused IE7 to choke with a cryptic error message. Seems to be fixed now, but you really should use Firefox or Chrome instead of IE.

I’ve been working on some improvements to the site the last few days. The default display mode is now just maps instead of satellite — it loads faster and you can always switch. Eventually there will be a cookie to remember user prefrences.

I’ve fixed the URLs so that you can email links to your favorite movies (Blues Brothers) and landmarks (Bridge Jump). This makes it alot easier to share things with your friends.

I’ve moved the blog from blogspot to a wordpress blog. I forgot the login and google changes things around and its just easier to start over. I’ll copy the old posts over sometime this weekend.