First outage
Noticed the first failure today. This was caused by an error when downloading the tpeg files. The parser overwrote the old files anyway and no data was displayed. I have fixed it so that the old file won’t get overwritten if there is a fault.
The parser app uses the Python logging module to implement a rolling file log which has proved itself a good idea already.
Also took off the ‘Country’ table row from the traffic/travel popups. They seemed a bit pointless and looked a bit daft pinned to the Rosslare Irish ferry blockade event!
Some notes..
I have been paraphrased. I don’t remember the spelling mistakes either. Oh well.
Some more notes on the site…
- When the tpeg file is parsed an extent is calculated around the lats and longs. This provides a central point which is the reason the map slides around when a selection is made. I haven’t added any margin on the extent so sometimes you will see outlying points ‘just’ make it onto the map window. Need to fix this.
- The span tag values are set to
lat=”6.0″ lng=”6.0″
These are figures I came up with by experiment. I cannot find a reference on the web as to how these values are calculated. I do know it is what controls the size of the viewport’ onto the map centred on the ‘center’ lat and long (strangely enough).
gtraffic.info
gTraffic.info is a website I created to display bbc travel information.
I originally started working on this just after the original google maps standalone code came out here. At that time the BBC published their traffic and transport reports on their Travel News site.
Subsequently the backstage site came online and this is where the current data is supplied from.
The website is driven by an application written in Python which downloads the xml files and parses them into a format which the Google Map control can display. It also generates an xml summary file which is fetched periodically using an XMLHttpRequest object.
The icons on the traffic and transport pages are colour coded to indicate severity (red – severe, yellow – medium, green – slight).
I used the lats and longs for the cctv map from here (thanks Rhys Jones) but the format of the popup is my own. I plan to put the traffic data on the the cctv map as well when I can figure out how to get the map panel to resize properly.
There are a few things which don’t quite work as well as I would like.
- the selection occasionaly gets a bit mixed up.
- map panel doesn’t resize.
- cctv popup doesn’t always go to correct size.
I am aware that Google can yank there maps away whenever they feel like it so we’ll see how long this last for.
Comments and suggestions welcome.