New Features On The Way

You may wonder why there have been fewer articles in Ke Nalu recently, and why it’s taking so long to get the SUP surfing and SUP distance e-books done. it’s not just that I’ve been spending all my time getting the crap scared out of me in Maliko Gulch. I’ve been working on a set of new technical features for Ke Nalu, mostly minor improvements like a better email newsletter platform, and pagination of articles to support both easier reading and mobile phones (did you know that Ke Nalu has full iPhone support?). But the BIG improvement is going to be full GPS support, including geotagged pictures and text.

Very soon you’ll be able to plug your GPS into your computer, go to Ke Nalu and create an instant article that uploads your GPS tracks from your GPS, and displays them on your choice of maps, including Google Earth. You can write blocks of text that link to specific pointers you can drop onto the track, and add individual photographs to your track tags, or if you have a set of photographs uploaded to Flikr that were taken along the journey you can grab them and they will be automagically connected to the right spot–or at least pretty darned close.

If you don’t have a GPS and you’d like to show where you surf or do downwinders and build a similar article you can just enter the coordinates and we’ll make you a map, or you can go to Goggle Earth, draw a map, then save the KML file and upload it to Ke Nalu.

All of this is a lot of work, and not only am I a one man band, but I’m also a fairly lousy programmer, so it’s taking a while. But here’s a preview. The functionality is still scattered all over my development sites, but here’s how the display works:

Garmin TCX file split from history [deltazoom=2; gpxspeedchart=show; gpxspeedchartheight=200 ]

This is a live display, generated from a GPS output file. You can manipulate the map, slide it around, zoom it, etc. it’s not a screen shot. In fact to see the track fully you’re going to have to click your mouse on the screen, which will give you a “grab” spot and pull the screen down and to the right. that little bit of blue you see in the upper left corner is the track. since the track describes an arc, the map is focused on the geographic center of the trac, which is kind of out in a cornfield. I can offset that, but I’m lazy and it’s a good idea for you to interact anyway. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

I also have the upload capability for Garmin GPS working, though barely and it’s both ugly and flaky. Still, you can see where I’m going with this. to try it first go here and install the plugin into your browser: CLICK HERE

Then plug your Garmin GPS into your USB port and CLICK HERE Be a little patient after you click on the upload button, once the program loads the data from your device it needs to separate all the tracks stored in your GPS into individual tracks. The files are big so that takes a while.