Politics, innovation and technology…
Bizarrely, the map of all the Green Tax Switch meetings on Flock Together suggests that all the meetings to date are in a straight line between Dorking and Hazel Grove.
You can see for yourself here.
Update: The link in the earlier edit of this post has now been corrected. Mike Bell in Weston-super-Mare has opened up a new ley-line. All other entries (including a new one in Wellingborough) remain on the previous one!
Liberal Drinks is quietly gaining momentum – with 5 “drinks” going on around the country now:
It’s early days, but it’s an encouraging trend. (And mostly thanks to the hard work of James Graham).
You can find out more at the Liberal Drinks website (which also has a Liberal Drinks map).
If you’re registered on Flock Together, you can also add your own ‘drink’.
Once again, it’s time to crack open the champagne. This time to thank James Graham for launching a Liberal Drinks blog.
We’ve mashed-up the Flock Together RSS feed for Liberal Drinks and the Google Maps API again to create a map of upcoming events.
I hope there’s plenty of entries for the Liberal Drinks logo competition.
I’ve always been pretty rubbish at designing buttons, but here’s a couple for Flock Together.
This one is the same size as the Lib Dem Blogs button.
And this one is the same size as the buttons on the Federal website.
Hope someone else can do better! Comments welcome.
After finally working out how to make the maps in Flock Together clickable, I’ve now also added the functionality to put Flock Together events automatically into Google’s newly launched Calendar. [For an example, check out the button at the bottom of this page or try the button below].
Unfortunately, Google don’t appear to support the RSS/xCal feed that I’ve been using for publishing events. They’ve published a fairly simple standard for entering individual events via a single URL (which I’m using), but to enter a series of events it looks like you need to provide an iCal feed or their own format of XML feed.
In a burst of enthusiasm last summer, I put the functionality into Flock Together to publish iCal feeds, but I’m a bit loath to switch it on. iCal feeds (or .ics files) tend to get opened by Outlook on many PCs and, as far as I can recall from when I last tried it, Outlook falls over if you ask it to open more than one event in a single file. It’s also not currently clear whether Google will index external feeds, so, unless there’s an immediate clamour to the contrary, I will wait and see how many people use the Google calendar service via Flock Together before taking things any further.
A big thank you to Simon Werner at Maidenhead Lib Dems for inspiring me to get on with making Flock Together’s Google maps clickable. Now if you submit a meeting, you can move the pin so that it’s in exactly the right place via clicking on the map.
Next step is to reapply the pins from Ming’s campaign map – although perhaps I should design a ballot-box pin for by-elections?
