I’ve been asked a couple of times how to get started with subversion. Here is a very quick list of the commands required to get started working in a repository.

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If you have Google Earth, you can now see Encyclopedia of Earth articles as you navigate the planet:

http://www.eoearth.org/eoe.kml

The backend code is pretty crude, but I believe that I have things serving up “streaming” KML data the way that Google Earth expects it.

This page about HTML/CSS opacity is pretty cool.

Geonames has all sorts of geocoding data available via a fairly extensive web services interface (in both JSON and XML!). Their data is also available for download, with a Creative Commons license.

• Determine country and (often) state/province given a latitude/longitude
• Find Wikipedia articles near a point or within a bounding box

We have just completed the rollout of substantial feature enhancements to the Encyclopedia of Earth. Some of the changes include:

• Substantially improved search
• Embedded interactive maps (courtesy of Google) in articles and search results
• More flexible support for additional metadata fields

When I initially wrote the search functionality for the EoE, I used the PLucene search engine, which is a pure-perl implementation of the Apache Lucene project. It worked fairly well, providing good search results and the ability to create a rich query language.

Unfortunately, it is very slow. By the time the site reached 500 indexed documents, it was taking 8 minutes for the indexer to run. Obviously this wasn’t going to scale…

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