Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers.
Sorry about the slight downtime there folks. We’re back online again with added goodness. I’ve put the Google Earth links back online with some caching to cut down on the number of database queries. We’ll see how this pans out and then I’ll see about getting the map back up. As usual, if there are any problems let me know here.
This form will auto-link URLs or you can use simple HTML, <a href="http://googlesightseeing.com">Like this</a>.
Link to specific places either as a Google Maps page or a decimal latitude and longitude written like this: lat/lng:55.949400,-3.200000.
If you've found an unrelated sight that you think should be posted in its own entry then use the suggestion form!
With 144 pages of glossy high-quality satellite photos, the weirdest and best of Google Earth is now available in the…
I took some ground level shots:...”
Just a thought.
Since you are already querying the database once for each post, couldn’t you just pass the coordinates and description (and anything else you are querying in /mapfiles/gearth.kml) to gearth.kml instead of a post id (/gearth.kml?p=495) that way you don’t have to query the database again when generating the google earth file?
That make sense?
Actually, I thought gearth.kml was generating the google earth files, but after looking around maybe it’s just pointing you to a file that already exists and NOT generating the files on the fly….
Maybe i’ll stop rambling now. hahah
Okay, last one I swear!
gearth.kml is obviously generating the files, so my original thought stands. Instead of passing an ID to gearth.kml, having gearth.kml open the dbase and grab out the info it needs, why not just pass everything you need right to gearth.kml and never bother making another querey?
Ahh, gIMpSTa my friend. There is often more than one point per post, how would your system cope with that? It would also make messy urls and breaks the whole point of the db and, just, no. Thanks for the input though.
hahaha It was just a thought. You could easily pass variables for multiple points to it.
It doesn’t really defeat the purpose of the DB if you are consolidating queries. I mean you are accessing the database for each and every post, so why not take the data then, make a URL that passes it to the script generating the files, and not have to query the database every time someone clicks a link? You are not “breaking the whole point” of the db, you are simply eliminating the need to go back to it again.
Anyway as I said it was just a thought, you guys are obviously entitled to do things however you wish! I’m sure the caching will help a lot.
Glad to see things back online.
PS - i’m not getting any joy out of any of your feeds
woowoowoo, you talking about the network link?
Network link should be working now. It’s now cached to generate only once per day.