[Herts] Mashing up the LUG

[Steve Clark]

We've talked before about revamping the LUG web site, but we don't seem to 
have got anywhere as yet. I would just like to make some suggestions, some of 
which I have mentioned before:

1. We're into open projects, so we should try and show them support. The 
OpenStreetmap project has really come along in the last year or so. Their 
coverage of Stevenage is pretty good, so perhaps our map to show the meeting 
location should come from there now. You can see it at

http://openstreetmap.org/?lat=51.88936734398042&lon=-0.1718201749844773&zoom=15

I can see it's missing a few minor roads compared with the existing one, but 
maybe we could do a mapping session one month to remedy that. I know a couple 
of people at least have a GPS.

2. Also on the mapping front, I think we should drop the Frappr link. It's 
another non-open system. Ages ago I managed to make a Google map of some 
members based on metadata embedded in their web sites

http://bagofspoons.net/map/gmap.html

I know Google are not as open as we might like, but they happen to have the 
best free mapping API for now. Maybe OpenStreetmap will add something similar 
one day. Meanwhile, if more people added the GeoURL data to their sites and 
we got the member list page up to date, we could have our own map that we 
fully control.

3. A common feature in various open source communities is the Planet blog 
aggregator. A few of us have blogs with RSS/ATOM feeds and some of us to 
subscribe to each other. There are also other sources of similar data such as 
Last.fm (music listening), del.icio.us (bookmarks), Flickr etc. A nice site 
to bring those all together is

http://mugshot.org/

A bonus is that it's open source, from Red Hat. They have concepts of contacts 
and groups. We could start a Herts LUG group. There are alternatives like 
Facebook, but I don't like the proprietary nature of these. 

Okay, I just wanted to get those thoughts into the open. Any comments, 
suggestions, criticisms are welcome.

-- 
Steve
http://bagofspoons.net