User talk:Crox/Poster

Hi Crox, great poster tool, thank you very much!

Is it maybe possible to provide a translated version? This might be more encouraging to locals to respond. I would have offered to help translating the poster to German, but looking at the Babel template on your user page you probably don't need help there ;) LeslieHapablap (talk) 05:06, 11 May 2013 (EDT)

Hello, and thank you for your feedback.

Since the documents are generated dynamically, each text can be easily translated (with the exception of the customized comic), and I'm happy to implement that feature. I actually considered a multilingual design similar to this Berlin poster, but dropped it in favor of the current version mainly because most of the wiki is written in English anyway.

Maybe another option instead of translating the whole poster would be to add a prominent localized "what is this about" text/link? It should even be possible to "calculate" the local language at the geohash and embed this dynamically.

What are your thoughts?

Best regards, --Crox (talk) 21:49, 11 May 2013 (EDT)

You are right about most of the wiki being English, but many of the important pages explaining what geohashing is about are translated to several languages. A translated version of the poster should probably include a link to the main page in this language (if available). A prominent localized "about" text passage is of course also fine! But If you calculate the language based on the coordinates I would vote for a manual override option because there will be many special cases (e.g. Südtirol).

Thanks for considering to implement this! --LeslieHapablap (talk) 14:28, 12 May 2013 (EDT)

I think a localized section at the bottom of the poster is a good idea. I will gladly provide translation to Polish if you decide to implement it (please do :D ) Norill (talk) 19:48, 3 July 2013 (EDT)

Comic generator does no longer work. I would guess his harddrive is full? I have taken his code and setup a second location here: http://draradech.de/cgi-bin/comic.py?year=2008&month=5&day=24&lat=55.218512&lon=6.566854, so you can use that (either as backup, or in general). Draradech (talk) 15:08, 14 May 2013 (EDT)

Thanks! In the meanwhile, I have reimplemented it based on Hugo's code and files and integrated it in the poster generation. This allowed me to improve (I hope) the overall look, and also to add support for globalhashes directly in the comic generation tool instead of the rather ugly overlay hack I was using before... I will do my best to find the time to cleanup the new code and release it asap. --Crox (talk) 15:30, 15 May 2013 (EDT)

The advert banner on the discussion page is a bit misleading, as it tells people they can make comments without registering, which is not true. If you try to edit a discussion page without being logged in you are told that you don't have the permission to edit. --LeslieHapablap (talk) 00:09, 24 June 2013 (EDT)

I've changed the template to reflect this. Unfortunately this probably reduces even more the chances to get feedback from random people... --Crox (talk) 17:22, 13 August 2014 (EDT)

Please could you consider addding this useful tool to [[Category:Implementations]] so it can be found more easily. Sourcerer (talk) 10:11, 11 August 2014 (EDT)Sourcerer

I've done that too, the other things on the list (eg localization) will have to wait a bot more I'm afraid... --Crox (talk) 17:22, 13 August 2014 (EDT)

What do you think about translation to other language(s) and one more (optional) parameter:
http://geo.crox.net/poster/[date]_[lat]_[lon]_[language]
I could give you the German text. --Q-Owl (talk) 04:28, 29 January 2015 (EST)

The poster endpoint is no longer working at least since 2018-08-11

The poster endpoint no longer works, for example for this sample URL it gives the following error message:

 TCPDF ERROR: [Image] Unable to get the size of the image: http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?markers=52.513956,0.036241&zoom=16&scale=2&size=600x400&maptype=hybrid&format=jpg&sensor=false&key=xxx

When I try to load the generated Google static maps API URL, it returns an image with an error message referencing this URL: https://g.co/staticmaperror/signature

(Note that you have to copy-paste that link into a new tab, otherwise if you visit it from this Wiki then the API will reject it due to a Referrer Header being set).

That links to a help page explaining that API requests must be signed. This must no doubt be a recent change to the Google Static Maps API? Saxbophone (talk) 11:57, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

I have nothing to add to this except that it was still working last Wednesday. --Fippe (talk) 12:18, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the notice. Unfortunately I'm currently in China, which means i.a. no access to any Google website/service. In order to quickly restore the poster generation functionality I've replaced the aerial imagery with the OSM static maps used by the Anthill tool from Ekorren. --Crox (talk) 15:24, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

You're very welcome, I hoped it'd be useful. Thank you very much for jumping up to fix this so quickly! Do you ultimately wish to move back to using Google Static Maps API in the future? If so, I'd be glad to help with this if I'm able and if that would be useful to you. Saxbophone (talk) 20:44, 11 August 2018 (UTC)

All-black maps?

http://geo.crox.net/poster/2019-08-01_51_-1 shows an all-black map. Bug? --DanQ (talk) 08:52, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately it seems I now get this error when fetching the tiles from OSM: Access control configuration prevents your request from being allowed at this time. Please contact your service provider if you feel this is incorrect.

I'll try to contact them to see if the restrictions can be lifted.

Thanks for reporting this!

--Crox (talk) 13:11, 3 August 2019 (UTC)