Photos on a Map - 2006 Travels

I've put together a new version of my Photo Map prototype. This time around the pictures are from my 2006 travels - a small selection of photos from India, Denmark, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Napa Valley. Check it out, play with it... enjoy! Then come back to read more about whats going on behind the scenes.

The first version of page was written when the Virtual Earth APIs were just released, and unfortunately no longer works, because of API breaking changes. It was also implemented in directly authored script. And finally, the image information was all embedded in script (equivalent to fetching data via Ajax), which doesn't lend itself very well to search engine indexing. Finally, the cross-fading effects between images relied on DirectX filters that only worked on IE. This time around I did things a bit differently...

This time around I used Script# to implement the logic... so all the coding was done in c#. Its nice to be able to compare a before and after on the same scenario, and see the improvements in developer experience. I've implemented support for Virtual Earth APIs in Script#, which I'll release soon (so stay tuned on that front).

Instead of using DirectX filters, this time I used WPF/E to implement the interactive image slideshow. The nice fallout of using WPF/E, given its cross-browser support, is that the cool fading effect is also usable in browsers such as Firefox. Its a very simple implementation, but the power of scriptable XAML is there to tap. As I've blogged about Script# support for WPF/E, in some sense, its just another scriptable DOM, which makes it immediately an appealing technology.

Finally, I decided to experiment with the Google Adsense program to get some first hand experiment with the program, as well as start thinking more about how these type of context/relevance scenarios play with Ajax scenarios. The first thing I did was embed image information into the page as regular HTML, and now use script to attach behavior and functionality to the page's existing content, rather than fetch the data behind the scenes. Obviously this works only in some cases, but when it does it automatically makes the page more interesting from a search engine perspective.

I'd love to hear comments about the photo map experience itself (I'll admit it was implemented in a bit of a rush today), as well as any other topics such as search engine optimization as it pertains to Ajax, etc...

And happy new year and best wishes for a great 2007 to all!