The Golden Hour App

A kind visitor from the USA pointed out a bug in that daylight savings time was only being correctly applied for the initial starting location and not for locations you selected from the menu or locations reached by clicking on the map.

I was mulling how best to fix this when I came across the geonames project which has a great little webservice for turning latitude and longitude into timezone information. Adding this into the code has enabled me to correctly track daylight savings time as you move around the map and so the local times should now be accurate wherever you are looking on the map.

Enjoy …

I’m delighted to see so many visitors to the site from overseas, but today I’m wondering why I’m getting a huge traffic spike from our friends in Belgium, Denmark and today, Sweden. Have I been mentioned on the radio or something?

I’m most flattered by the attention, but I would love to know why so many of you are searching for this site at the moment?

Can anyone shed some light (ha!) on the matter??

Just noticed that searching for golden hour on google brings this site up in position number one 🙂

Regular visitors (thanks!) will notice that I’ve taken the public flickr photographs offline and replaced them with a selection of my own photos. This is not what I desired, however the creative commons licensed images on flickr are simply not representative enough and the better images that you get when using the public API to search for public images sadly resulted in a DMCA take down notice as flickr think it is appropriate to return copyright images in that particular feed.

I might have lived with using just the creative commons images, despite the huge impact on performance (flickr do not yet make it easy to purge copyright images) but after seeing too many portraits of pets and black and white images that had nothing to do with the golden-hour, I decided that until another source of photos available for non-commercial use becomes available, the use of flickr images will be withdrawn.

Some work to clean up the code, place javascript in external files and improve page loading times is complete – also this morning spotted (& fixed) a small calendar bug whereby the red “today” square could be displayed twice depending on the month layout.
Next development for the calendar is to localise the public holidays – at present it shows a UK format calendar and UK holidays although the underlying module supplying the data can in fact render this information for a range of countries around the world. Just need to map information returned by the geolocation code into the correct localisation – possibly using google maps API on location information, we’ll see.

Just need the time to do it…

Well what a day that’s been. Who’d have thought that innocently using the public flickr api to display public images on a personal website could cause such aggravation!

The issue arises from the fundamental flaw in flickr in that public images appear in all the rss feeds and default searches even when the owner has marked them as all rights reserved.

Now call me picky, but there seems an inherent conflict with uploading images to a public web service, marking the pictures as public, and then indicating that they are all rights reserved.

It seems to me that Flickr should take steps to prevent images that are all rights reserved from appearing in any feed unless they are being accessed by the owner’s api key. That would stop the problem dead and might encourage photographers to make more use of the creative commons licenses which give perfectly enforceable protection against commercial exploitation which is why some people seem to be so tetchy about it all.

Now I have no wish to offend anyone, so I spent the entire day coding a much more sophisticated feed for the photography page that checks the licence of each image to ensure it is not rights reserved. However, there are two unfortunate consequences of this.

The first is that the photo page is now much slower as instead of a single API call, I have to make over 72 to check rights and owner details of each image. I would implore Flickr to expose this information as standard in any API call that retrieves a result set of photos or simply stop protected images being exposed in the API.

Secondly, and more seriously, due to cross domain policy issues, I now have to proxy all the images through my server which means my bandwidth costs will rise, possibly to the point where the service has to dropped.

I think it would be a shame to have to drop it for that reason, however I may be left with no choice.

Hey ho …