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Look at the mess in here...
I've got my "Gwulo mum" hat on! Please can you spare 10 minutes to help tidy up?
The list below (subscribers, please click here to see it) shows all the Places that are missing a "Date completed".
How to help
A quick wrap-up for this year, and some ideas for next:
If you've ever tried the "... more places" link over on the left of the page, I bet you've only tried it once. It was just about unuseable.
I'm pleased to say that the recent round of work in the boiler room has made it a lot better. I've just posted up the finished version, so I'll be grateful if you'll try it out and let me know if it works ok: "... more places". (It works fine in Internet Explorer 8, but it's still slower than I'd like. You'll get much better performance if you use FireFox.)
Another stint in the boiler room, this time adding dates to a place's name (aka its 'title'). eg if you look at this 1945 photo, you'll see these places listed:
I haven't written much these last few days. Instead I've been working down in the engine room on a couple of new features:
First is this new map. You choose a year, then it shows all the places that could be seen in that year. It gives a snapshot of Hong Kong in a given year, which will be useful when we're trying to date old photos.
If use Twitter, you can now follow Gwulo to be notified whenever we publish a new article.
You'll have noticed that Tuesday's photo is a bit different from the usual. But what won't have been obvious is that it's a first step towards selling old photos on Gwulo.com. Here's the story so far....
From time to time people ask if they can buy copies of the photos shown on this site. Each time I've explained that 'sorry, they aren't my photos, so you'll need to contact the owner.' Then a couple of months ago the lightbulb went on and I thought, hold on, if people want to buy old photos of Hong Kong, why shouldn't they buy them here?
This new feature helps you see how a given location has changed over time.
How to use it
To try it out, please start with the Place for the current HSBC building in Central.
On the right of the screen you'll see a new menu item 'Previously at this location', showing a single option, 'HSBC Headquarters Building (3rd generation)'. Click it, and you're taken to the Place for that building, along with associated notes and photos.
Shall we build one?
We've made a good start: batgung.com already has 900+ places, 1,800+ photos, and several thousand notes and comments. But recently I've been thinking about how we can keep it growing and improving, and would like to hear your ideas and feedback.
Why bother?
Let's clear up one obvious question first – we already have the internet as a catalogue of Hong Kong's memories, and Google to search it. Do we need anything more?
We've made some changes so that it's easier to give photos a location. That in turn will make it easier to search for photos that you are interested in.
What it is
If you look at a photo (the software we use to run this site calls them 'images'), you'll now see a new section 'Places shown in this photo:'. And, ta-da, it is followed by a list of the places you can see in the photo.
Similarly, if you look at a place, you'll see a new section 'Photos that show this place', which ... well, you know already.