Cooliris is a flash plug-in that “transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to enjoy photos from the Web.” Technically, this was constructed on the same basic backbone as the original earthalbum site; the one difference is it does not support geotagged bounding boxes at high zoom levels.

Regardless, I find it to be surprisingly fun– hope you enjoy it as well!

I didn’t think it was the worst movie in the world; it had a 16% TomatoMeter reading on Rotten Tomatoes, which still put it miles ahead of Catwoman and Babylon A.D. In any case, the premise is neat– the movie focuses on a group of gifted individuals who have the ability to teleport (”jump”) anywhere in the world at will.

It’s now pretty easy to be an armchair Jumper with the “Jump to” feature. I placed the “Jump to place” bar in the upper right-hand corner of the page. You can type in pretty much any kind of address in the bar; it uses Google’s reverse-geolocation functionality to jump you to the right place in the world. For example, you can type anything from “Egypt” to “Hawaii” to “Sydney” to a particular address in the world. Based on what you type, it will try to guess whether what you typed is a country or a city and jump you to that place automatically.

Have fun!

If you are a Flickr enthusiast, you can use earthalbum to browse any Flickr group by simply constructing the following URL: http://www.earthalbum.com/flickrgroup/groupname. For example, if you want to see the Flickrgroup “fishes”, you can go to: http://www.earthalbum.com/flickrgroup/fishes.

You can search for Flickr groups here. After you see find a group that you like, click on the group name, and you’ll be brought to a page with a URL that looks like this: http://www.flickr.com/groups/blackandwhite/. All you have to do at that point is take the part after http://www.flickr.com/groups/ (in this case “blackandwhite”), put it in the groupname, and voila! you’re set.

Some more examples:

• http://www.earthalbum.com/flickrgroup/blackandwhite
• http://www.earthalbum.com/flickrgroup/sunrisesunset
• http://www.earthalbum.com/flickrgroup/florus (flowers)

and here’s what they said about it:

Thanks to all– I’m glad you like it!

You can see some of my personal favorites by clicking the “editions” link on the earthalbum homepage– e.g., you can see the sunsets of Thailand, the snows of Japan, or explore the world in the particular aesthetic that only black and white photos can give you.

I’d be interested in any other suggestions folks might have!

For the most part, new users aren’t going to notice anything different when they hit the main page. However, there are a lot of little things that have been redone that were meant to improve the experience:

• If you zoom in a bit (use the slider) and start clicking, you’ll start seeing yellow bounding boxes. This shows the top-rated Flickr photos that have been geotagged within that area.
• The geography database and algorithms have been completely redone; while it’s still far from perfect, areas should be far easier to click on.
• You can now type an address directly into the bar at the top of the screen.

Hopefully, these changes will make the site more interesting for you; it certainly continues to be a lot of fun for me.

A few technical notes: I’m moving earthalbum.com from westhost, where I have been overloading my tiny $5.95 per month account, to slicehost, which has been getting rave reviews in the development community. I must say that so far, slicehost has been outstanding.

On another note, I also migrated the entire site from Ruby on Rails to straight PHP. Why did I do this? Several reasons ranging from administration to performance to library support to a growing distaste for object-relational mapping layers; but at the end of the day, the reason I switched was because contrary to what everyone else is saying, Ruby on Rails made everything just a bit harder than it had to be. I’m probably in the minority here, and I could still imagine some projects I’d use Ruby on Rails for, but just goes to show that there aren’t any universal hammers in web development .

Anyways, I hope you like the new earthalbum as much as I do!