Styling the eagle
I’ve been having fun with the Fire Eagle integration on my blog - yesterday I posted my first real geotagged post (here, while I was at Senate House Library, University of London; my previous ‘Eagled posts were me pretending to be in Paris).
I have just been styling them. I just have to write a brief ode to CSSEdit - which makes editing CSS so simple for me (I have a terrible memory for CSS properties) - and for CSS itself. Love it.
Anyway, the design I was shooting for was actually based on datelines from news reports. At the beginning of news reports, you’ll often have “NEW YORK CITY” or “BASRA” or whatever. For short posts, I now have a little italic dateline before the post and a dash to separate it from the post itself. For longer posts, I decided that having the dateline at the end would be better, and justifying it to the right. I’m very much a design amateur, so I hope it’s not too tatty on the design front.
I’d like to write (or better yet, have someone else write for me) a J2ME MIDlet application that uses the Sony-Ericsson Java geolocation API to update Fire Eagle with my current location - either using the Sony-Ericsson proprietary API or through JSR-179. Now that would be cool.
I am also planning to add some extra functionality to my site soon using JavaScript and the sexy framework known as jQuery - specifically, new functionality related to the microformats and other embedded data - letting you lookup geolocations on maps, export KML and let you browse tags. All of this will be unobtrusive, will not affect you if you don’t have JavaScript turned on (for instance, if you use Noscript in Firefox to filter JavaScript and Flash on sites you don’t trust or opt-in on sites you do like).
What I am hoping will come out of things like this is that people will start treating their blogs as playgrounds to experiment with new forms of content, and new ways of linking that content together - using Semantic Web technologies and so on. We don’t have to wait for Google or a VC-backed startup to do something - we’ve got all the technology to do it for ourselves. I’m sure that’s a neat vision for personal publishing. And it’s a good way for me to learn jQuery.
