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What is guestMap? View the Map Map me! How I did it

What is guestMap?

Have you ever seen any websites offer Guest Books? You know, that little page where you add some personal information and comments, free for all to read.

As luck has it, this is a Geography related website. What do geographers do, apart from correcting people about placenames? Maps! We love representing everything with maps, no matter what our attribute is. And that is fortunately my passion too.

This is my way of collecting information about my website. I think all will appriciate this, since it looks much better than a bunch of text. Remember, this is in the early stages, so not all features are implemented. To be exact... The score of the website is not fully implemented yes. In the future, each dot will have a different color to show the score. There will be average scores for same locations, and the dot will closely become larger as more people from the same region sign in.

For now, enjoy what I have prepared and send me any comments and questions you might have.

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View the map

Map of geoGraphia visitors since April, 2003

guestMap.small.jpg
 
  • = 1 visitor
    		•   
    Projection: Mercator
    Base map source: flatplanet natural maps collection - hastings-trew BIG
    Created by: Michalis Avraam, using xplanet
    In other sizes: 1200x800 JPEG | 2400x1600 JPEG
    Other maps: night Projection | Seattle Centric | night Seattle Centric
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    Map me!

    Below is the form to fill to be included in the map. Please note, only the red sections are required. The information that can be used in the map is Latitude and Longitude. If you provide further information, I can create some further statistics and fancy graphics to provide you with here.

    Please note, to find the specific information about your location, please visit: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names, or astro.com, or Heaven's Above, or even Calle Global Gazetteer. All open in new windows when you click them.
    City:
    Country:
    The following values should be in decimal degrees. To transform geographical coordinates, follow the simple example here
    35° 17' (35 degrees and 17 minutes) = 35 + ((17 * 60) / 3600)
    = 35.283 decimal degrees
    Latitude: Numerical value, North positive, South negative.
    (+/-)DEGREES(DOT)NUMERICAL_DEGREES (ie 35.17)
    Longitude: Numerical value, East positive, West negative.
    (+/-)DEGREES(DOT)NUMERICAL_DEGREES (ie 33.37)
    Name:
     

    Please note, the map is regenerated only once a day. Don't expect yourself added on the map as soon as you press the "Map me!" me button. This is due to restrictions on the University server hosting me. I am searching for a solution to this.

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    How I did it

    One word, xplanet! For any of you that don't know what that is, please visit the xplanet Website to see what it is. The basic idea behind it is: use a cylindrical image of the world, use a bit of math to produce a map in the projection you want, then overlay dots where the users come from, and output it in a JPEG format.

    The information is collected from the above form, saved on the server in a flatfile database. Then, a little script I wrote on my computer is used to fetch the data from the server. The data is automatically formated in the way xplanet wants them, and then simply xplanet is used to render a new image. After the images are updated, the script uploads them back to the server.