[Evangelism] Google Earth simulation of "flying" to all World Plone Day locations

[Nate Aune]

I thought it would be cool to show a Google Map of all the World Plone
Day locations around the world, so I started manually typing them in
and adding them to this map: http://tinyurl.com/world-plone-day-map

This proved to be quite tedious so I've opened up the map for
collaboration, so that *anyone* can add locations to it. If you are
hosting a WPD event, please add your location so your city will be
included on the map.

Then I thought it would be even cooler if we could "fly" around to the
various World Plone Day locations using Google Earth. Noticing that
this page provides an RSS feed of all the WPD locations
(http://plone.org/events/wpd/2008/wpd), I googled for "rss to kml" and
sure enough, there was a utility to convert the RSS feed to a KML file
which can be opened by Google Earth.

Open this file in Google Earth:
http://idisk.mac.com/nateaune-Public/world-plone-day-locations.kml

If you want to do this yourself, here are the instructions:

1) Go to this page:
http://www.geonames.org/rss-to-georss-converter.html

2) Scroll down to the bottom of this page, and paste in the URL:
http://plone.org/events/wpd/2008/wpd/RSS

to the "Rss to KML (GoogleEarth) Converter" form. The resulting file
can be renamed to have a .kml extension, so that you can double-click
it to open up in Google Earth.

3) In the Places pane, navigate to Temporary Places ->
world-plone-day-locations.kml -> World Plone Day

4) Click on the folder

5) Click on the play button to start flying around the world!

For some reason, the KML file contains only the first several
locations (up to Córdoba, Argentina). I'm wondering if it's not
unicode-friendly, and choking on the ó character in Córdoba.

Anyways, it's pretty interesting to fly around to these places, and
makes a great intro as people are arriving at your WPD location, or
during a break.

Have fun!
Nate


-- 
Nate Aune - natea at jazkarta.com
http://nateaune.com (personal blog)
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http://twitter.com/natea (daily updates)

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