The Tour of Wales

I have resolved the problem with the Google map on the castles of Wales page. All the castles are now mapped on the google map interface, and I shall add in the remainder of the castles on this page over the next few weeks.

Drupal, it seems, has plenty of mapping functionality available. Having written the Castles of Wales page largely by hand, I find that there are facilities for geocoding pages. I'll experiment with the prehistory pages next, to geocode these onto a Google map.

Let me know what you think.

I have now added Aberystwyth, Carreg Cennen and Cardiff castles to the Castles menu, with some noew photos too.

A few more and all the original castles from the gallery will be transformed into the new site and I can start on castles that I have not yet touched. I will also start on the replacement "Age of Castles" page, with a google maps interface.

I think this approach is right and should be extended elsewhere in the gallery. I'll probably start on prehistory after Castles, as there are so many interesting prehistoric sites to cover in Wales, and so little space on a single web page.

There are many good photos out there. On Flickr you can find just about anything you want, but sorting the good from the bad, knowing what you want and finding an image that is not "all rights reserved" can be a problem.

But with Creative Commons share alike licenses, it is possible to use good photography on sites such as this one.

When I started the site, I took all the photos. There are two problems with this: I am a photo hobbyist, but a long way from a professional, and my work shows this. Also it means that I can only show pictures of places I visit. And if the day was grey an miserable, the photos are either moody or else they are boring. Usually the latter :(

I have added some new pictures of Beaumaris Castle on the Tour of Wales site, and created a new page just for this. My intention is to create a full castle list with new photos on each. Then I can redo the "Age of Castles" page.

My thinking is that I could use a Google Maps interface (or Microsoft's local service - when it supports Safari maybe) to geolocate the castles.

This shouldn't be hard to do - but will just take a bit of coding effort (and I'll have to locate the location data for the castles). If anyone has locations for the Castles of Wales in lat/long format, please feel free to pass it along to me.

The Tour of Wales has undergone several incarnations, each an improvement on the last. When I started the tour in 1993, it was a huge success because there was nothing else out there for Wales. On the other hand it was small, linear and non interactive. The web has come a long way in the last 13 and a half years.

But the site has been suffering from neglect, and I have decided to refresh it. I am hiving off some of the non core stuff in the tour into spereate sites, and concentrating on a tour of Wales and the Welsh only. At the same time, I want to add to the interactivity, so as to make the user experience on this site that much better, and to begin to foster some sense of community.