| RobRoyAus |
| (Tourist) |
| 09/14/05 03:49 PM |
| View in Google Earth |
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UK Autumn Colours
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With Autumn fast approaching I'm planning some photography trips to catch the colour. I found the Great Britain Forestry Commission's Autumn Colours web page, but I wanted to see the data in Google Earth, so I wrote a servlet to scrape the colour information from the Forestry Commission site and display the information in Google Earth.
The network link in Google Earth will revisit the Forestry Commission site on a daily basis and keep the coloured leaf icons up to date as the forest's change across the UK (assuming of course the great people at the Forestry Commission also keep their site up to date!)
The writeup and link to the kml file is at on my blog at www.roblog.com
| Frank4 |
| (Master Blogger) |
| 09/16/05 06:16 AM |
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Re: UK Autumn Colours
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Cool application! I hope someone will do this for the US as well.
(By the way, you can edit and click on the advanced button for the placemark to save the current view so the UK is visible when someone first loads your application.)
| RobRoyAus |
| (Tourist) |
| 09/16/05 08:01 AM |
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Re: UK Autumn Colours
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Frank,
Can't help with the USA I'm afraid
There are actually two kml files - the first sets up a network link call to a php script on my server. The php script is the one that actually scrapes the Forestry website and dynamically generates the final kml file with the full data. This second script takes a few seconds to run and download - hence the delay where you see an icon in the sidebar but no details.
Not sure how I can tell GE to fly around to the UK after it finishes loading - but Im hoping someone can tell me!
Rob
| BigJacko |
| (Tourist) |
| 09/20/05 07:18 PM |
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Re: UK Autumn Colours
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Sweet idea... gonna keep this one in My Places
Thanks!To make it zoom to the UK when opened/loaded, you'll need to:
1. centre the viewpoint on the UK first
2. right-click on the placemark (or the entry in your My Places list) and select 'Snapshot View' (this forces the view to be saved with the placemark)
3. move the display somewhere different (like Germany), then double-click on the placemark's entry in your My Places list again, just to test that it really is focusing back on the UK
4. If all is well, right-click on the placemark entry again, and select 'Save as', and put the resulting file somewhere handy.
5. Go back to your starting post in this thread, select 'Edit' (top-right), then use the 'Preview/Change Attachment' button (near the bottom), and simply replace the currently-attached placemark file with the new one you just made and saved.
6. Add an Edit note to your post, so everyone knows it's changed, and submit the post.
That ought to sort it, I reckon.
Well done for a top idea!
| Frank4 |
| (Master Blogger) |
| 10/06/06 09:50 AM |
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Re: UK Autumn Colours
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Hey...it looks like this is still working...I still think this is a cool application of GE and the network link.
| RobRoyAus |
| (Tourist) |
| 10/16/06 07:12 AM |
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Re: UK Autumn Colours
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Yep, noone was more surprised than me to see it working again. The Forestry Commission put up their Autumn Colours page in the same place with the same format, so everything just started working.
Here's the link again
Enjoy!
Rob