This update addresses a long-standing issue with document encodings. Now the WebExport python subsystem checks the encoding of HTML documents with the appropriate meta tags, (assumes ISO-8859-1 if none is available), and reads and writes back out depending on that format. Understands any encoding that Python is aware of, which includes Latin-1 and UTF-8, among others.

Get it here.

I am working on a Google map hack that shows the full route of the SoCal 24 hour race put on by the folks at Team Sole:

Course Overview and Detail

Well, me and my buddies (on Team Animal Tested), just completed a 24 hour race. Phew.

The Story:

A week ago, we find out our planned 60hr race in Downieville is cancelled. We're pissed, we wanted to race and frantically look around for a race. We found a 24 hour race in Big Bear, just a week away, for an amazing $50. We contact Team Sole, who is putting it on, and they let us do it. We run through all the pre-race prep in a huffy, figuring we can rent Kayaks in Big Bear. We pack up the car, ask some of our parents to crew for us, and we jet. We get to Big Bear at 4:30, and realize we still have to pick up the kayaks. By the time we get there, "Captain John" is gone, and we are stuck… so we "picked them up" (stole them), and left a note on his desk. Uh oh.

We make it to the race meeting in time to eat some pizza and paint our faces like something with whiskers (we're the Animals from Team Animal Tested, see?). At the race meeting they tell us what a crazy race we got ourself in to. We wondered to ourselves, did we miss the "Expert Only" note on the website? 11000ft of elevation gain? Tough navigation? Desert heat and alpine cold? Did we actually read anything about this website? Do we want our money back? Hell No! We get the maps and checkpoints, and plot the points on two extra-large MyTopo.com maps. As we are working with our maps, we notice Team Dart/Nuun sitting next to us doing the same: cool. In Cycling you never get to prep next to Lance Armstrong! Adventure Racing is sweet because it's small, and you can actually get tips in person from the best in the business.

Once finished with the maps, we hop in the car and get close to the race start which was 2 hours away. It's basically 12AM before we bed down in a Humane Society outlet store. Ugh. We would have camped out on the roof, to avoid the light, but we got some nasty looks from our support crew (Dan's mom and uncle). We get up at 4AM (yes, we only got 4 hours of sleep), and we make it into Pioneertown. We start at 6AM, and we embark. Here is a map of the course, but to make it quick: 31 hours, 7000 calories, and dozens of sleep-monsters later, we make it into the YMCA camp that is the finish. We roll in 5th in our division, 8th overall, ahead of over a dozen teams who dropped out. We were tired, happy, and glad to be able to play in the hills with some of the strongest, most determined guys and girls in the world.

Many thanks to the course directors Karen and Paul of Team Sole, for putting on a hellacious and long course that pushed us like crazy.

Let's Say you have a standard WordPress PHP WebLog running on your server. It looks a little like mine, but you've got a different template and a few other details.

You are happy with this setup, but you want to share more than just text, and have a ton of pictures in your iPhoto library, and want to get them out, and onto your webpage. There are two ways to do this, by hand, or with some software. Clearly, you don't want to do it by hand.

Enter WebExport 1.0, specially designed to do just this, on my machine (you can check out my photo galleries at mountainmandan.net). Here's how to do it yourself:

First, download WebExport and the WordPress template, which is designed to work with the default WordPress theme and comes in the same tarball. It is easy to modify the WebExport templates to work with other themes. Install the theme by double-clicking it, or moving it to ~/Library/Application Support/WebExport (which you may have to create).

Boot up iPhoto and select the photos you want to export. Select "WebExport" from the choices at the top of the window, and you will be greeted by a potentially scary looking window. Don't panic! Select the wordpress template from the drop-down, and see the "pathToRoot=../../" pop up. This string tells the template how to get to your main wordpress directory from the directory it lives in. You can edit the titles/authors of the images in the "Metadata" tab (you can save it back to iPhoto for easier editing).

Now you're ready to export. Click "Export" at the bottom of the page, and navigate either to the location you have WordPress installed in (it should have all kinds of wp-stuff.php files in it), you can also export to a temporary directory, and upload it to your website. Create a folder inside the wordpress directory called "galleries", and another one inside that one with a UNIX-ized version of your gallery name (My Favorite Photos -> my_favorite_photos). Select this directory and click "OK". Wait while WebExport does it's thing, and when it's done, open up that page on your webserver (local viewing won't let the PHP work).

Great, now you have a website, but nothing links to it. You can either manually add a link to your sidebar.php theme file, or you can make some PHP code that automatically does that, like in my sidebar.

The final product:

WebExport is a universal exporter for iPhoto 5 and 6. It is geared for the production of low to high end photo galleries on any kind of website. I developed it to produce the galleries on my website, and in all likelihood, it will work on your site.

This is beta software, don't expect it to work right off the bat, I'll get it working…