Category Archives: computers

Migrating URLs with Apache

I recently migrated this blog from Blogger, which was posting via SFTP to a shared hosting provider, to a self-managed Typo installation. One of the biggest reasons I didn't do this sooner was that I didn't want all of my old URLs (and the links that point to them) to stop working. After all, what is the point of a permalink if it stops working one day? It isn't that I have such high page rank with Google or anything, but I didn't want to have to start over from scratch.

I wanted to be sure that if someone either typed in a URL that used to work, or followed a link from an outside page, they would end viewing the content that they expected to land on. I thought some about having some kind of logging, so I can be aware of when people use these old links, and where they are coming from. I also thought about having some mechanism for alerting the user that the link they followed is old.

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been busy…

I haven't had much time for my side projects lately, which means no blog entries. School has been very busy, but here's a preview of what's to come:

  • CPAN module to interface with the Lemur information retrieval system. One of my school projects involves writing a search engine using Lemur as a backend. So, I wrote a Perl module to parse the results. After the project is handed in, I will submit it to CPAN.
  • Update to my utility for plotting multiple points on Google Maps. The Google Maps API has just been updated, including geocoding support. Hopefully this will make the geocoding much faster.
  • Revamped Frisbee site. The new site is going to be written in Ruby on Rails, with a real database in the back end. It will feature RSS feeds, and I'd like to incorporate some AJAX functionality.

That's all for now, but check back soon!

-PK
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Plot multiple locations on Google Maps

gmaps.kaeding.name :: Plot multiple locations on Google Maps

I just made a few improvements to the mapping script. For example, now it will center at the average of the points, instead of on the first point. There is still a lot of room for improvement, though, so I hope to put some more time into it in the next few days/weeks. Also, notice the URL has changed.

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Plot multiple locations on Google Maps

Plot multiple locations on Google Maps

Hey all

A few days ago, I had two appointments downtown in the financial district on the same day. I wasn't sure how close they were to each other, so I got the idea to look them up on google maps. However, I soon found out that you cannot plot more than one location on google maps at a time. (Well, that's not completely true, since you could plot one point, and then get directions from there to the other place. But then what would you do if you needed to plot three places?)

So, I decided to see if I could hack something together using the Google Maps API. The result is at: http://gmaps.kaeding.name

It isn't pretty, nor is it perfect, but hey, it works (at least when the addresses are accepted by the geocoder).

You enter as many addresses as you want, one per line. Then the script sends those strings through geocoder.us to get latitude and longitude. (The Google Maps API only allows you to plot points using latitude and longitude, not by supplying an address). Sometimes, geocoder.us will come back with more than one possible address for a single string. So, the next page asks you to confirm the addresses. The final page displays the map.

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