Data? Sources?

Good old friend PHP

Yep, PHP was my entry to web development. I instantly fell in love with the intuitive and fast development this language enable me and therefore I was stuck with it. But it has it’s downsides. The bigger an application gets, the easier I loose overview and the harder PHP is to debug, not at last due to it’s easy-cheesy error handling and it’s very unstrict general behaviour. What makes development fast makes debugging a pain. So I soon realized that what I need to be efficient was a framework. So I started to build object oriented parts of my applications, just to find out how poor PHP4′s oop-support is.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine happened to develop a small PHP-application and so he told me about the ZEND-Framework, which just is about to become a stable and working release by now. I had a look at PHP frameworks before but never was happy with them, but the ZEND-Framework instantly hooked me up. Within two days I understood the concept and had the basis for an automatically localizing, Smarty-based framework application on the go. Back with love. Thanks ZEND-Framework. So I decided this would be the backend-basis for my humble website project.

Photos

Now for the photos. In about march this year I stumbled upon flickr (don’t ask me how I could miss it until then, I have no idea) and since then got a real addict. It’s openness and the tools coming with it are just overwhelming. I always looked for good photo-archieving software, but couldn’t find anything flexible enough. Flickr had it all, from flexible tagging up to sharing, visual geo-tagging and the archive-calendar. There you go, 20$ a year, no big deal.

So all my photos are on flickr. That said there’s no way I’ll upload them anywhere else just to make them available on my website. No way. Lucky as I am flickr not only is providing a state-of-the-art API, but furthermore there’s an flickr-API-wrapper included in the ZEND-Framework. That for the photos.

Photo locations

But those photos need a little more spice. And at least for my california-trip (jan & feb 2008) I want the photos not only to show up, I want them to be displayed on a map, including my route following the chronological order of the photos. That’s the idea and I hope I can make it until then. The obvious thing to do would be to use a Yahoo-map, since flickr is a Yahoo-service and therefore these two might work very well. But I found the GoogleMaps API much more pleasing, plus I also use GoogleMaps for other mapping stuff as well as other Google-services, so sticking to Google here sounds like a good idea to me.

Sharing blogs

Sure my blog will be sophisticated and superior, as well as of highest interest to every reader. But there are other blogs out there, which I like to read. And I’d love to share those as well. And, as said earlier, I really don’t like doing things twice. Currently I am using GoogleReader to keep track of blogs. And as it happens this GoogleReader has a share-function, resulting in a feed containing all the blogposts I want to share. So this will be the source for my shared blogposts.

My own blog

I learned to like wordpress and I’d hate to dump it. Fortunately that’s not necessary. As my website project shall be a mashup I’ll just use WordPress’ feeds to feed my ZEND-application, and off I go. Next source located.

Putting it all together

So let’s have a glance at what is out there already and how I plan to integrate it to my new website utilizing the ZEND-framework:

• flickr as photo-source
  The integrated API-wrapper should make this one a pleasure rather than work.
• GoogleMaps as location-visualize-tool
  Fetching the geo-data via flickr-API-wrapper and utilizing the client-size GoogleMaps-API this also shouldn’t be too much of a big deal.
• GoogleReader as blogshare-source
  As this is a simple XML feed and the ZEND-framework offers quite a nice way to handle XML data I hopefully won’t run into problems here either.
• WordPress as my own blog’s source
  Same as above. But here’s where some more tricky parts come into play. First of all I’d like to offer users the comment-functionality built-in in wordpress. This requires some more thinking. The other thing is that I like to blog about technical stuff as well as about personal stuff, and I want to blog about travelling too. Mixing up doesn’t sound good … more about this some day later.