Sorry for not updating it for so long, but I had to rebuild the toolchain and too many things interfered.

KDE Worldwide will get some major updates over the next days, bringing it into modern times. You will be suprised :)

Providing Marble and Google Earth compatible data files is just the start of upcoming things.

I have some cleanup to do, since some people ended up on the wrong side of the world or in the middle of an ocean. I will improve verifing your entry a lot.

So current data, nice features coming and my head full of future plans for the upcoming new KDE website. World domination here we come.

I had problems to compile my nice little xplanet 0.95a, which I used for the maps. xplanet 1.0/1 could not produce the maps I needed. So I was a bit out of business. I now looked at xplanet 1.2 in a free minute and I can see light at the end of the tunnel. I could get all the things working, I need.

worldwide.kde.org will update soon!

Not today and probably not tomorrow, since I have to renovate the complete scripting mess I have around it. The campaign to render the planet covered with contributor dots is on rails, though.

The forms for submitting data were written at a time when e-mail injection was not even on the horizon. When I took over the maintainership, I never added thorough checking of the user input. I know, bad move. Jonathan Riddell was so nice to deactivate the forms when the spamming started and I was sitting in a train without Subversion access. Thanks for your fast reaction. Some messages slipped through, but I hope I caught this fast enough.

The forms are back and I added some light regular expressions to prevent missuse of them. If you have any problems submitting your data, let me know.

This is a quick solution, ready to be tested. Not the final look and feel, but “it should work for now”(TM)

The Google thingie is very heavy to load, slow, has no mouse zoom, shows only half of the devels because of overlaps and plays “Berliner Mauer” with the UK and Portugal/Spain. It is far from being usable for the use case. It is a beta after all.

I just want to play with JavaScript and with my work on worldwide.kde.org this seems like the right project.

Unless Google improves the API and possibilities of the Maps and recognizes Safari is not the only browser using KHTML they are not getting near worldwide.

Hope I made that clear enough ;)

Here it is:

Next steps: map for all KDE events with dates and links.

So if you have events where KDE contributors show the simplicity and usable feature completeness of KDE, drop me an e-mail. Preferably with coordinates of the events location and some informations. Outside the US, UK and Japan thats not really helpfull, since there are no maps, but for US/UK/Japanese events thats a nice way to figure out where to go and the others make the map look nice. :)

Another ToDo: check for complete overlaps and add people to the marker instead of overlapping. Another feature request from the comments. I am reading them. ;)

I added the available hackergotchis from planetkde.org. Now we need more hackergotchis.

It also features the nicks now.

There is a way to get the boundaries for the current view from the API. It may help to limit the added markers to the current viewpoint. The script still has to read all of the data though. I think derivating the markers and drawing them is still the most time consuming part, though.

The maps wraps at Greenwich and I have to find out how I can move that wrapping point away from the 0 longitude.

• Zoom with Shift+Mouse
• Drag with your mouse
• Several higher resolutions for the background when zooming in.
• name placement, so nobody is missing
• Enlarge or Shrink the size of the widget itself (you need Konqeror for this, since Firefox is not able to do it ;)
• switch between names and nicks

Check it out and let me know what you think about it.

I want to implement something like Google Suggest for docs.kde.org so I decided to get my feet wet with some JavaScript exercise. The Google Maps APIs seemed like a nice thing to level up my skills. Together with the documentation this was almost too easy. Took me about 2 hours without any real JavaScript knowledge to get a Google Map with all kde contributors up. Including using a XML file for names which has potential for showing almost everthing else.

This will not go to worldwide for the next time. Why?

• You need Konqueror from trunk to make it work.
• Since Google still ignores that Konqueror from trunk can render the Google Maps, you have to use a Safari user-agent to use the map. ;)
• Both, Firefox and Konqi produce several “script needs too many ressources and will slow down your browser” windows. Seems more than 360 contributors are too much for the Google Maps ;)
• Markers overlap, so contributors are hidden below others. No way around that except calculating a placement algorithm myself which means people end up in odd places. The script is bringing Firefox and Konqi almost to their knees already.
• No maps outside USA, UK and Japan. (thats why it defaults to “Satellite” for now)

I am using a XML file for the data, so perheaps I can somehow limit the count of markers which have to be submitted and need to be processed. Only one of many things needed to make this useful.

There is one nice thing missing in Thomas Java applet

• gorgeous pop-up windows showing the name and perheaps an image.

and Thomas is working on that. So after I work out how to get pretty buttons instead of the ugly Java standard ones on the applet it is much better up to the job than Google Maps.

Please leave a comment what you think about both of them.