DEPRECATED

This site has been completely re-written and launched in March 2012.

This PHP version is no longer being supported.

Please visit http://www.earthexplorer.info so see the new version in action.

Thanks! Feedback is much appreciated!

Introduction

EarthExplorer.info was first concieved one weekend while talking with my 10yo son about geography. We were talking about how different geographical descriptions are like containers and can be neighboured or even overlap.

I figured the best way for him to get his head around it was to explore the world for himself. At the time I had a bit of interest in the Yahoo! GeoPlanet. data so I set to creating EarthExplorer.info.

The total code base took about a day all up including looking around for a decent template. It's a bit rough, but I wanted to get it out there.

I'm certainly interested in hearing any suggestions or receiving patches/updates.

How It Works

The Yahoo! GeoPlanet data is selected using the Yahoo! Query Language. Since this kind of data doesn't change too often (except in the more politically volatile areas of the world), we kind of cheat and cache the geo data. We also query Wikipedia for any interesting information about the area being viewed. I was thinking of using [Freebase] as it looks like a very interesting database, but the learning curve was too high at the time so it simply has a [Freebase] information popup in the search field.

Application Configuration

You will need to configure the earthexplorer.properties file. This file is used to populate the app/config/settings.xml file in both the development and production environments. Once this has been completed, you can setup the development environment by running agavi configure. When you are ready for production use agavi deploy. The following settings show what needs to be entered into the earthexplorer.properties file:

• YAHOO.ymappid - Yahoo! Maps application id
• reCAPTCHA.publicKey and reCAPTCHA.privateKey - reCAPTCHA keys for the contacts page
• Google.site.verification - the site verification code provided by Google Webmaster Tools
• Google.analytics - Google Analytics tracking code
• UserVoice.key, UserVoice.host, UserVoice.forum - codes from your UserVoice account
• Contact.email and Contact.subjectPrefix - are used by the contact form for sending information to the configured email address. You can confiure a subject prefix that will be prepended to the subject the user has entered

Google AdSense

I haven't worried about extracting the AdSense settings yet, so they are still hard coded in the template. You can find the AdSense module in app/modules/AdSense. You'll have to replace the google_ad_client and google_ad_slot with the values from your own AdSense account.

Alternatively, I have no problems at all with you leaving the ads in place with my codes :)

Apache Configuration

A sample apache configuration file can be found in dev/apache/earthexplorer.info.conf. Obviously you will need to configure this to suit your particular host and paths.

Installation

This project is based on the Agavi PHP application framework so you need to be familiar with that. Be sure that the agavi shell script is in your path. If you don't have Agavi installed you can use the supplied agavi script dev/bin/agavi.sh. Just be sure to edit the script so that AGAVI_SOURCE_DIRECTORY points to the absolute agavi library path in libs/agavi

From the shell execute the agavi/phing "deploy" task with agavi deploy. The defaults are kept in the file earthexplorer.properties.

Permissions

Make sure the following directories are writable by the web server:

• app/cache
• app/GeoNamesCache
• app/YQLCache

The agavi/phing "deploy" task will change the permissions to 777, but you may want to change this to something a little more secure on your installation