Alex Reid

On Tuesday night (Jan 24th, 2012), the City of Vancouver added a dataset of Street Trees to the City’s Open Data catalogue. The dataset includes a full address listing of all boulevard trees on the streets of Vancouver, along with species type and other characteristics.

The next afternoon, this food social group got on the case and created a map of public fruit trees on city boulevards in the city. The group next wants to find out where the public fruit trees in public parks are.

Over the past two years, I’ve been asked by many organizations and business start-ups which Content Management System (CMS) platform is right for them: WordPress, Drupal or Joomla.

For individuals and small businesses, I suggest WordPress.

For organizations with money, I suggest Drupal.

For anyone with money and time, I suggest Joomla.

Here’s a cute infographic you should check out.

Usability

Drupal is more of an API or framework than a high-level publishing platform. It’s made by and for developers who want to get their hands dirty under the hood playing around with the engine. Newbies beware.

The complexity of Drupal allows for a powerful taxonomy mechanism built in that allows for maximum content categorization. Drupal is better used for sites wanting to create a large community (say like a large membership base or a social network platform).

WordPress on the other hand was built by a community of bloggers and increasingly over the past couple of years, web site owners using WordPress as a CMS platform. It is a publishing platform.

You can also publish a ‘network’ of blogs like the New York Times did.

WordPress is very easy to use. Install is a snap, and upgrades can be uploaded using a friendly FTP upload or even auto-updated without any extra work, which is really handy for those starting off as a web site owner.

Security

WordPress used to be behind on this aspect but has really caught up in the past 18 months with the other CMS platforms like Drupal or Joomla.

Flexibility

Drupal has 7,000 modules/plugins and WordPress has over 12,000 plugins. Drupal has almost 800 themes and WordPress has nearly 1300.

Montreal web developer and blogger Cedric Sam put together a brilliant Google Map mashup displaying election results of each of the 308 federal ridings – poll by poll!

He “used cartographic data from the Geogratis.gc.ca website. I imported the Shapefiles to a PostgreSQL database with Postgis. Then, I processed results by polling divisions from the 2008 election, data available on the Elections Canada website. It was put in a separate table on the same database. A custom program in Python using the very handy libkml (a code library developed and supported by Google) took the data and outputted pretty KML code. It was packed as a KMZ and uploaded to my webspace. [E-mail me, if you want to exchange ideas on the code]

The webpage itself is rich in JavaScript and the code can be seen here. I use hashes to make the webpage bookmarkable and loadable with a given riding pre-loaded.”

Sam has a lot of cool things going on, check out his blog here: http://smurfmatic.net/blog/

Eric Fischer created two series of major world city maps showing where people take photos, using geocoding information from Flickr and Picasa. In his first series hosted on Flickr, titled The Geotaggers’ World Atlas, he used geo tagged photos over a nine day period in late May 2010 to show a heatmap of where most photos were snapped.

A week later, he created a second series over a five day period in early June 2010, titled Locals and Tourists giving the city maps more depth by comparing “tourists” to “locals”.

He explained:

Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month). They are probably tourists but might just not post many pictures at all.

Purple would obviously be the merging of both tourists and locals.

Of course, these only count those photos that were geo-tagged and posted on Picasa and Flickr publicly. But the series gives you a great idea of where to go on vacation, where the locals go and if you’re thinking of opening a camera supply store, where to setup shop.

For me, this is a big help as I have a planned trip to San Francisco in a couple months and it’s also quite inspiring; data visualization made art!

Ahti Heinla, the Chief Technical Architect for Skype, put together a heat map of the world’s most photographed places (or “World touristiness map” as he calls it) based on analysis of photos on Panoramio, a photo-sharing site that geo-tags photos.