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Hey all,
I've been working on a brand new mapping facility for charting LEGO
organizations worldwide. It's for mapping all types of LEGO user groups
(LUGs, LTCs, MUGs, etc.) as well as for events (BrickFest, BricksWest,
NWBrickCon, LEGO World, etc., and ultimately any number of smaller, more
localized events that people might want to add). Here's a quick
demonstration of what the maps look like at this point:
http://www.lugnet.com/~1/WorldMap/
Note that you'll need an SVG viewer to see the maps. SVG stands for
Scalable Vector Graphics and is a W3 open-standard language for describing
two-dimensional graphics. If you're using a modern browser such as a recent
release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Apple's Safari, your browser
probably already supports SVG. If not, simply download Adobe's SVG viewer.
It's a little like the way PDF files and Java programs were handled a few
years ago before PDF viewers and Java interpreters became commonplace in
browsers.
Please consider the maps to be an "alpha" release. Not very much testing
has been done yet, and major functionality is still missing, most notably...
* the ability to click on a country and zoom the map,
* the presence of icons or markers denoting organizational focus (trains,
robotics, general),
* country names, and
* readable city names (they're currently too small and often overlap)
One thing you might notice above is that the maps are embedded on an FTX
page. I designed the map generator so that this would be possible because I
want the ability for these to appear anywhere that they might be convenient,
for example in group sidebars, and for that reason the maps can actually be
rendered at any size -- from very large (e.g., 4000x4000 pixels) to very
small (e.g., 100x100 pixels). I'm not ready to document publicly yet how to
embed these in an FTX page because the syntax is still subject to change,
but you can still try out this form-based map generator:
http://www.lugnet.com/test/map/
You might be wondering why the "From" and "To" sections are grayed out.
It's because I haven't implemented that part yet. What you'll be able to do
is say, "Make me a map of this area that shows all the LEGO events that
happened between this date and that date," or, "Show me all the events that
are coming up in the next three months." Just for fun I'll probably add a
button you can click that will animate the events in time -- so you'd see
little circles popping up and fading away as time progressed forward. The
same could be done for the formation of user groups over time.
Also on my to-do list for this:
* Make a friendly intro page. The overall resource needs to be as easy
to use as the current World LUG Map is before it can replace that.
* Make a page where people can add their own club events (date & location).
* Make a page where people can request that their club be added.
* Improve performance of new-map generation in the case of cache misses.
* Document the FTX syntax used to embed map views on-site.
* Document the HTML syntax used to embed map views from off-site.
(You'll be allowed to link directly to the graphical map data file on
the LUGNET server and easily embed maps in your own web pages.)
* Investigate possibility of displaying static GIF images for browsers
that don't support SVG.
* Investigate other cartographic projections.
* Investigate customization ("skinning") with external XML style sheets.
--Todd
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