earthalbum.com

I’ve been on hiatus for several months, but I spent the better part of the long Thanksgiving weekend trying to make earthalbum better.

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!