The Village of Stockland

History

I first started working on the Tour in the year 2000, some four years after the launch of the Stockland site. If memory serves me correctly, the first pictures were taken on 35mm film, then scanned from prints. These pictures have been largely replaced by images taken with digital cameras.

To handle the relatively large number of pictures and relationships between them, I drew up a map of a set of nodes; each node had a number, and each picture taken from the node had a letter. Rather than write a huge number of web pages to handle all these, I wrote a simple template and then dealt with building the pages with a load of JavaScript. The downside of this is that it did very little for the overall accessibility of the site.

I took further pictures, with which I planned to extend the tour, a few months before I left England. Nothing much happened then, until Easter 2006, when I had a blitz on the Stockland site and completely re-wrote the Tour mechanism.

Technical Stuff

The Tour, as it stands now, is created using a fairly simple Perl programme. Relations between pictures (forward, back, left, right, etc.), text and geospatial information are stored as metadata in a simple SQL database. This new methodology makes the Tour much easier to maintain, although it can still be tricky establishing the relationships between the pictures and working out what to write in the text!

The original Tour pages converted for insertion into the database using a few regular expressions (regexes); where would we be without them?

Hopefully, now that the tour appears as a set of 'normal' web pages, Google should be able to get its teeth into it and improve the indexing of the site. To this end, I have set up a re-write in the Apache web server configuration so that 'normal' URIs are used; once again, a benefit if you want the pages to be crawled by Google.

Lessons Learnt

Making sense of the relationships would have been much easier if I had planned the shots on paper before hand. Drawing up the relationships and then going out with a "shopping list" of photographs is probably the best way to go.

Carrying a GPS receiver for all the shots would have been good, as this would have allowed for more extensive collection of geospatial data which could be used to link the tour to a map. A digital camera that records GPS data as part of its EXIF metadata - now that would be really cool.