Puzzlepieces – tag ‘opensource’

MapQuest Dev Blog – MapQuest Opens Up – in the UK - people’s eyes tend to gloss over when I explain that it won’t be that many years before most online maps and GPS devices use OpenStreetMap as their data source. And although use of OSM has been spreading, this is a very big deal… MapQuest is not only using OSM data on a demo site, but hiring people who have built parts of the open source map stack to improve their work and release it openly, AND contributing $1 million to the open mapping cause in the US. Good job AOL.

Brain Off » Open Source Geo Stack :: Mikel Maron :: Building Digital Technology for Our Planet - since I emailed Mikel asking for a list like this about a year and a half ago, I can take credit for it, right?

Anyhow this is a great list that includes everything except the actual sources of data. The best one for that is often OpenStreetMap, but it really depends where and what you’re mapping.

I installed WordPress two days ago and have had a little time to work on it. I’ve never used WordPress before and I’m extremely pleased with how easy it was to work with it and the plugin I’m using. That plugin would be Jerome’s Keywords.

After activating it I made modifications to my templates so that tags are displayed instead of categories for individual posts. I also modified the plugin to add a ‘related tags’ feature to the tag pages and search results pages, and a ‘common recent tags’ feature to the home page. All of which are done in order of frequency. The tags are also displayed with the meta keywords tag on individual post pages, tag pages, and search results pages, the latter two using the ‘related tags’. Lastly, I got the tags to show up in my atom feed in dc:subject, but not in the HTML.

So, that’s that, and I’m very happy with it. The only thing left to do really, is a ‘all tags’ page, but as I don’t know much about either WordPress or this plugin I think I’ll wait until the next version of the plugin for that.

Oh, and I intend to roll this back into the plugin eventually.

Update April 10 - I have added links to ‘this tag elsewhere’ from tag pages, added atom feeds for each tag and for any search, and added a ’search within this tag’ option to tag pages.