WWMX’s photo database, though, is very small. Flickr has many, many more geotagged and timestamped photos. Flickr doesn’t make that particularly easy to explore by time and date within their interface. To find photos taken near, in location and time, to a given photo from a photo’s page, you would: (1) Go to the photo’s page. (2) Click the map. (3) Click to explore photos taken near that location. (4) Adjust map to desired zoom level. (5) Once the map loads, open the filters. (6) Enter a taken on date from the original photo. (7) If there are many results, go to the “link to the this page” link. (8) Paste URL in browser. (9) Edit time range in the URL. Hit enter. (10) Repeat.

I’m lazy; this was too much for me. Additionally, depending on the location and the event, I may want to play with the parameters a bit, and wanted a better interface to do this than the URL. For my own convenience, I’ve written a bookmarklet that will take you from a (geoagged) Flickr photo page to a page of thumbnails of photos located nearby geographically and chronologically. You can try it by dragging the below bookmarklet to your toolbar:

You may get some unexpected results. There are four general contributors to this that I’ve noticed. (1) Some users just geotag photos wherever seem right. (2) Some users don’t have their date and time set right. (3) Sometimes the combination of users’ recorded photo info and time zones doesn’t work out (I’m using a time zone offset from the photo’s location, which helps a bit). (4) Sometimes the Flickr search returns incorrect results.

There are also some better ways to implement search (particularly with respect to paginating photos according to distance and time rather than the options provided by the Flickr API), but those will have to come later. In the meantime, have fun and let me know what you think.

I’ve been looing at something to fill the role of business cards for a while. In all of my looking, I never really found something that worked for me. As a student, there’s the whole question of what to put on a business card. Without an affiliation, the cards would look rather bland and empty, unless a really big font got used. They also weren’t really very good for the semi-professional, semi-social interactions that students often have.

I’m hoping that the minicards, with a size and shape that says “I’m not really a business card,” fit this bill. I ordered my free pack of ten earlier this week, so we’ll see. The interface for designing and ordering your cards, by the by, is a pleasure, though it will likely leave some wanting more options.