Web Working Group Monthly Recap 3: May 2015

It's been a quieter month than usual for the Web Working Group, at least as far as coding has gone. The big events were last week's OpenHour, (which actually happened in June, but let's not wait a month to celebrate it!) where fellow WWG member @btbonval, @justinmanley, and others showed up and we talked a lot about our efforts over the past year to open up PL's codebases and make them easier to contribute to.

There was also a good bit of buzz about Leaflet.DistortableImage and MapKnitter 2.0 around the 2015 State of the Map, which is great, and has resulted in our committing to adopt the Open Imagery Network's standard for metadata -- which will get us listed in their imagery directory.

@justinmanley published a great overview of MapKnitter 2 and Leaflet.DistortableImage in a post entitled, excellently, "The Magic Behind MapKnitter: Leaflet:DistortableImage": http://publiclab.org/notes/justinmanley/05-21-2015/the-magic-behind-mapknitter-leaflet-distortableimage

MapKnitter

Part of the excitement about MapKnitter revolved around the completion of @anishshah101's past summers' work on GPS auto-placement of images, where we used a Google Maps altitude service to calculate the height of the camera above ground level. We're talking to folks from OpenTerrainMap to see if we can use open data for that feature as well.

There's still an outstanding bug with EXIF orientation tags, but many images work pretty well. Here's two that've been auto-placed:

Overall, only 8 issues were closed on MapKnitter, however -- read more in Github Pulse:

• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/172 deletion inconsistencies bug - 12 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/168 Outline mode makes images not entirely transparent - 12 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/159 Altitude considerations for autoplacement enhancement - 18 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/177 Legacy annotations missing annotations - 18 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/143 Firefox map not responding to commands bug - May 5
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/173 maps not shown on PublicLab.org profile page - May 4
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/164 Export map taking long bug exporting on May 1
• https://github.com/publiclab/mapknitter/issues/170 Auto place picture with skycam app crash the map bug

PublicLab.org

Just 5 issues were closed -- read more in Github Pulse

• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/282 Re-design of the Blog page 19 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/281 Slippy map of Archived maps URL error 26 days ago
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/276 Main header image fails to upload in edit mode bug May 1
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/277 Parent tags no longer showing up bug - May 1
• https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/145 site hangs on /search/mapknitter; optimize bug - May 1

SpectralWorkbench

SW hasn't seen any activity this past month -- but again, we're hoping to get that re-started soon as my commitments to the WhereWeBreathe and Open Air projects wind up: https://github.com/publiclab/spectral-workbench/pulse/monthly

Thanks to everyone and have a great week!