Tag: canalplan

My Poor Neglected Blog

Was it really in 2017 that I last posted on here? I guess it must have been.

Since then I’ve been boating several times with two week long holidays to Llangollen and a round trip round the West Midlands and Birmingham – which is actually a lot nicer than it sounds.

I’ve also done two trips to Maine – for Thanksgiving in 2017 and Christmas last year. Both of those trips have given me good blog header banner photos. The first one is of Three Mile Pond, near China Maine

This second one was taken down near Dresden Mills, Maine

I’ve been working on various bits for Canalplan AC  – basically adding support for importing and displaying of Canal and River Trust Stoppages. I’ve also been working on moving the Canalplan site off Google Maps after we got a rather large bill for serving map tiles.

I’ve also been working on my Canalplan Plugin for WordPress which needed quite a bit of work doing on it to keep up with the changes to the WordPress Editor.

I’ve also just been keeping the server ticking over -upgrading php and Apache to newer versions, and moving things over to HTTP/2 where we can.

In a couple of weeks I’m off on our traditional early in the year pub crawl round Market Drayton where a bunch of us from all over the country get together and have a good day catching up with each other and drinking beer in various pubs, before using the boat as a floating bedroom

Wordbooker and Canalplan

Well since I decided to abandon Wordbooker due to the major changes in the Facebook API and changes in the FB newsfeed algorithms which mean that Wordbooker posts actually got poor “reach” I’ve been working on the Canalplan AC Plugin for WordPress and also working on the Boat Index part of Canalplan.

The big changes to the Canalplan Plugin are to do with integrating Backitude. Backitude is an Android App that provides lightweight GPS functionality but what interested me is that it supports custom servers. So I sat down and coded up the stuff needed to get backitude to send its current location to the Canalplan AC plugin. The plugin uses that information to update the “Where am I” widget part of the plugin and it also passes that information through to Canalplan AC.

When we took on the Boat Index from Jim Shead we worked out we could do some clever integration into Canalplan.

So if you are logged in you can :

  • “like” a boat, actually you can like as many boats as you like
  • Edit Photos and “tag” them with any of the boats in your liked list
  • Nominate one of your “liked” boats to be “tracked” (Beta only at the moment)
  • Down load a backitude configuration to allow you to send track information to Canalplan (Beta only at the moment)

So Canalplan can now track a boat either directly with backitude or indirectly through the Canalplan AC blog plugin.

Boat tracks can be viewed by people and you can also see the current location of any boat which has enabled public tracking.

If you are logged in you can also:

  • Change the visibility of any tracked route you’ve created
  • Delete any tracked route you’ve created
  • Edit any tracked route to remove “rogue” tracking waypoints
  • Change if your tracked boat is public or not. If its private then none of its trips are available. This might change in future

These second set of features are only available in the Beta version at the moment.

Eli Stone

When Eli Stone first aired on Sci-Fi neither Kathy or I really showed any interest in it for some reason or another, maybe we weren’t in the mood or something else was on TV at the same time.

But this past week Sci-Fi has been re-running Series One as a precursor to airing Series Two which starts next week and we’ve been watching it and I have to say that its actually quite good and I think that the person who decided to commission the series went out on a bit of a limb. Its whole premise is different and the show is quite light hearted in places with some wonderful lines and nice little set pieces but at the same time it actually can be quite serious.

I have been doing other things too, no honestly I have

I’ve finally properly released my Last.FM Widgets Plugin for WordPress which is something I’ve been meaning to do for some time and I’m going to try to actively develop it because there are a few things that I had to fudge to get it working properly which could do with tidying up.

I’ve also been coding more bits of the Canalplan integration project and I’m hoping to get some of that released into the wild soon but some of that depends on Nick and his changes to his Database structures.

I’ve upgraded the Pub Night Council Web Site to the latest version of the Wikimedia software. This meant revisiting the code that drives all the added functionality because of the way Wikimedia changed how the parser has to be called which really wasn’t helpful but hopefully they wont change it again.