The Gallery map was timing out so i’ve deleted all the data for it. It work’s now but there is nothing on the map! I’ll try and re-add the info back at some point!
I’m also adding my photos now to flickr and then importing them here. The importer is having a few issues at the moment so photos will be lagging behind here for a while.
The flickr photos can be found on the flickr mirror here. I like the idea of having a backup and sadly flickr is the place to have photos these days!
I’m going to try and get up to date with my travel slideshows over the next week featuring images and movie clips from Australia 2003/2004. Staring with Cairns down to Sydney, then from Sydney across to Perth and from there up to Broome.
As a start, today i’ve added the first of these from Cairns to Airlie Beach. There are images from Cape Tribulation, Mission Beach, Magnetic Island and the Amazing Whitsunday Islands. It’s avaliable from the Movie Slideshows page or directly from its own page here.
As of today i’ve given all the slideshows there own page to embed them into the site. There’s a download option should this not work for any reason.
I’m not sure why this took so long but yesterday I added a new movie slideshow featuring the photos I took from the two weeks I spent in Portugal back in July.
It’s avaliable on the Travel Slideshow page. Broadband is recommended as the movie comes in at just over 50MB! Also apologies for the second music track. It was on Portuguese radio alot!
All the photos from the movie can be found in the Portugal Gallery.
Gone Walkabout looks a little different from today. It’s leaving behind the blue colour scheme and going for a minty green. I’ve been using the default vSlider wordpress theme for a while now, and was probably one of the first to start using it. Since then it’s grown in popularity and it keeps appearing over the net.
Because of that increased popularity I’ve been after something a little more unique for a while, but nothing matches vSlider as a theme so decided to just go for a colour change. Not quite as simple as it sounds and i’m going on work on refining it a little over the next week or two. Some of the images, in particular, are a little messy right now.
Over the past few weeks i’ve added a few movie slideshows to the site. The latest features photos and video clips taken during 2003 travelling from Alice Springs to Darwin on a wayward bus trip and also a tour round Kakadu with the now sadly closed* Gondwana Adventure Tours. The movies a good way to get a taste of the things you can do from the Devils Marbles to Katherine Gorge and onto the natural wonder of Kakadu.
Also avaliable are movies from Alice Springs, Uluru National Park, South Australia aswell as one from Ontario, Canada. A few more Australia ones coming soon.
*If Gondwana Tours are still active then please let me know and i’ll update this post.
I’ve been doing a few things to gonewalkabout.info over the past few days.
Firstly, gonewalkabout.info got named as one of the April ‘users of the month’ over at clustrmaps. I have some more idea’s for the guestmap page too – just thinking about how to implement them.
Secondly both the postmap and photomap pages have been updated to use v2 of the google maps API! This should mean both sections now work across the majority of browsers including Safari and konqueror. I’m going to be working on both these over the coming days and there are a couple of minor issues but they’re worth it for the improved map resolution v2 of the API brings and the increased browser compatability.
Thirdly, i’m aware I have a lot of albums and subalbums in the gallery which can make navigation a bit of a pain, even if it keeps the images organised. In an attempt to help slightly i’ve added a navigation page which uses the ‘tree’ usually found in the gallery dropdown sidebar. I have some work todo tidying this up, but its working!
Finished! Phew… 
Last week I was talking about how I had added a guestmap to the site (sort of a cross between a visitors log and map). Two things annoyed be about what i’d done, the first is it required user interaction and the second is it was open to abuse from spam bots (and wow did it get hit!).
So rather than fix what i’d done I decided to make use of something i’ve been using to see roughly where in the world people have been visiting from since the begining of the April. That service is ClustrMaps. Eachtime somone visits Gone Walkabout an image is opened (its the one under visitors map in the sidebar on the left). ClustrMaps see where in the world the image is being requested from and plot that information on a map with a red dot. The more people visit from the same location the bigger the dots get! Then each day that map is updated and made avaliable to the world!
So, I’ve changed the visitor map page that I did have to a new one (same location) which means that daily map is avaliable to everyone. If you follow the link to the Gone Walkabout page on the ClustrMaps site there is also the option to ‘zoom’ in on continents for more detailed information.
I’ve added a permament section above the posts on the main page of the site showing three random images from the gone walkabout gallery. There are so many photos in the gallery its nice to be able to see a random selection!
Also, and something I should have been aware of, the various googlemap features on the site:
wont work on konqueror based browsers – affecting Mac and Linux users. The good news is that v2 of the googlemaps software is moving towards fixing this, in the meantime firefox will work when visiting those links.
I’ve also changed the layout on the photo pages in the gallery to show the photo details (exif, comments, ratings) by default which can then be hidden by the user instead of the other way round. Click on one of the random photos for an example.
As part of integrating everyone corner of this site with google maps I’ve added a visitor map which takes advantage of the google mapping system. It’s using a utilty called Guestmap which i’ve modified to fit into the sites theme. It’s basically a cross bewteen a visitors map and a guestbook.
It’s still needs some work as its using some very very messy coding right now, so if you have a slightly strict browser it may not display properly. Working on that
So, if you’d like to put your footprint on the site allow and leave a short message go see the visitor map! It asks for an email address, don’t worry you don’t have to leave one if you don’t want to
Update: I’ve decided to replace this with a ClustrMaps map instead to avoid spam and I knd of prefer this method
Earlier last week Gallery2 had an official 2.1(Blackjack) release and i’ve just upgraded gonewalkabout to that version. To go with that wpg2 version 2.0 was officially released too.
Both seem to be working well together right now, but should you spot any errors i’ve missed please let me know!
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