Well, you’re already halfway there!

#MauiSunset Project Update

Earlier this year, I posted about the #MauiSunset project I started as part of the Daily Maui Photo website.

The concept is simply to have Maui fans on Flickr submit their Maui sunset photos to the #MauiSunset Flickr Group, and then we could all use this link to view them listed by year, month, and day.

As of this post, we already have Maui sunsets from 185 nights for the calendar year 2011. That’s already half of the entire year!

You Can Help

185 nights for 2011 is great, but wouldn’t 365 be awesome?

If you visited Maui in 2011 (or any previous year) and have sunset photos you’d like to submit to the Flickr Group, we’d love to see them.

You can also help my sharing this post or any of the links mentioned here in your own favorite social networks and get the word out so we can try to reach that 365 total for 2011.

Mahalo,
– Kris

In a post last month, I mentioned a little project I was starting with the #MauiSunset Flickr Group. Well, about two weeks ago I kicked off a beta version of the #MauiSunset Catalogue over at the Daily Maui Photo website. This new page allows you to click back in time and view sunset photos from earlier this year, and years past.

It’s still an early beta, as there are many, many other features I’m looking to add this summer. The navigation is simple to use, but I’d still like to enhance it a little bit in the coming months, too. But for now, I think it does a pretty decent job of achieving the simple goal of showing Maui sunsets day by day, er, rather night by night.

The Numbers So Far

At the start of this week, we’ve already collected over 100 photos and 23 members in our #MauiSunset Flickr Group, which isn’t bad for just about 8 weeks time. As part of those photos, we have 46 photos from this past March, and 15 photos already for April. If you’d like to help out, even if you have photos from previous years, take a look at this post and scroll about 1/3 down for the details.

As with everything else, if you have any suggestions or comments, please let me know.

Mahalo,
– Kris

I’m still working diligently to go through all of our Hana photos from last month’s trip, but I wanted to take a moment to share info on a Road to Hana group on Flickr that I came across today.

As far as Flickr Groups go, this Road to Hana Group is still relatively small. However, it’s just starting out and there are already some great looking photos. I’ve joined earlier this afternoon and just started adding some of my favorites. As more and more people join and contribute their favorites, this is group is going to look almost as great as the drive itself.

To The Map
Another great thing about this Flickr Group is that geotagging your photos here is strongly encouraged. What this means is as this group grows larger, the group map will start filling up with lots of those little pink Flickr dots and the result will be a virtual drive along the Road to Hana. Now that will certainly be something to behold.

Wanna Help?
Do you have some really great Hana photos that you want to share? Are you already a member on Flickr? Go ahead and read the rules for this group and if they all apply to you, join on in and share your best. Mahalo to J&J Buzzard for starting this group and for invitation to join.

Welcome Page
For first timers to the site, I added a Welcome page that gives a brief overview of the different sections we feature.  There is a link at the top of the sidebar on the main page to make it easy for newcomers to find.  If you’re new to the site, or have only been reading the blog posts, go ahead and check it out.

New Weather Page
I also updated the Weather page this weekend, improving the look of the current conditions section and switching the data feeds from weather.gov to Yahoo! Weather.  The change to use Yahoo! also features 4 new locations on Maui that I wasn’t able to display previously.  I’ve also updated the current weather on the sidebar of the home page as well, to reflect this change.

Photo Tag Match – The Rematch
Earlier in the year, I had a little fun with the Flickr API and created something called the Photo Tag Match.  The concept was to count how many publically available photos on Flickr were tagged with any of the names of one of the Hawaiian islands.  For example, at this moment there are over 400K photos tagged with Maui, and over 3,000 added in the last 7 days.  To my joy, Maui has come out #1, or as we say, “No Ka ‘Oi”.

But, the island of Oahu, which has more residents living there than the other islands combined (source: Wikipedia), would not take to 2nd place rather lightly.  So I created a rematch, this time using geotagging information stored in photos on Flickr.  While there aren’t nearly as many photos on Flickr that are geotagged versus tagged with an island name, Oahu beat out Maui by a ratio of 2:1, with the Big Island matching a strong charge in 3rd place.

Other Geotagging
I thought doing the rematch was an interesting idea, and since I’ve been geotagging my photos for the last two years now, I thought it was worth sharing.  I’ve created some neat things using my GPS travel recorder and my photography, such as the Ka’anapali Beachwalk Photo Tour here.  Also, all the photos from our Road to Hana ’08 Trip have also been geotagged, so you can see a map of exactly where something was taken along that magical journey.  Lastly, our Island Guide map has links to photos taken in a particular location, just by clicking on one of the markers for a location you’d like to see.  Pretty neat.

More to Come
Other than neat new features on the site, I still need to get back to filling out details for other sections that are just dying for my attention.  A quick look at how many “coming soon” messages are listed on our site map (no, don’t click the link), it is a constant reminder that I’m a little behind. And with all the new things we’re going to be planning for our next trip, I need to get those finished before I’m really behind.

So play around with these new updates and let me know what you think.  I’m always looking for feedback and ideas on how make the site more useful and engaging.

Mahalo.
– Kris

Yesterday I finally completed the first major update from our most recent trip, which were the Trip 3 Itineraries pages. While that took quite a bit of time to put together, we still have a lot more to add here.

The next planned set of updates we’re working on are the videos from this trip and maybe even reviving a few from last year, too. I spent about 4 hours yesterday trying out different apps and settings for uploading to YouTube, yet I still wasn’t happy with the results. I even tried uploading a view to Flickr, which faired a little better quality-wise, but I still need to find the sweet spot. Either way, we’re hoping to have something added soon.

After we’re finished with the videos, there are still more to update. We went to a good number of new beaches, restaurants and sights and tours that we will be adding here, and there’s still the Road to Hana Photo Tour that I’ll be putting together to match (nay, better) the one we did for the Ka’anapali Beachwalk. And then still, after all that, we’ll be finishing our Books and Music pages in the Reviews section, as well as adding new pages for our favorite websites and blogs.

It’s starting to look like a long summer of updates, so it might not be a bad idea to subscribe to our feed here at the blog to receive all the updates. With so much left to do, February (our next trip) is going to be here before we know it.

Mahalo.

It’s not all bad, though. I was able to put in a good amount of time this weekend on the new Itineraries pages for our ’08 Trip. It’s not quite ready yet, but when it’s finished, there will be tons of detail from each day, and leveraging the Maui Twitter archives from our trip, too. It’s a pretty fun format that I’m using for those pages (you’ll see when it’s ready) and I’m thinking about adapting for the previous trips, too.

We finally printed our photos this weekend so Cindy can stuff them in an album and bring them to work, show them to all her friends, etc. I, on the other hand, had to spend sometime with the Flickr API yesterday and hammer out an interesting bit of code on my laptop that would update the Date Taken value for all of our geotagged photos, especially the ones from our Road to Hana tour. I’ve always used JetPhoto Studio to merge my GPS logs into my photos and upload them to Flickr, all relatively easily (as described here).

Well, it turns out there’s a little glitch with JetPhoto that overwrites the Date Taken value on Flickr with the date you actually upload the photos. Not good. Took me about a day to programmatically clean that up, which it probably would have taken three to change it for each photo manually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to have something new go live in the next week or so, and there’s still much more work ahead after these itineraries pages. Other than putting together the Road to Hana photo tour, all the other new pages will be far less of an effort.

Mahalo.

Wailua Falls
Originally uploaded by webnelly

Catching up on photos from our last trip, I uploaded the new set of photos from our Road to Hana tour, all geotagged with the GPS data from the tour. Right now, you can use the Map feature on Flickr when viewing each photo to see where it was taken, but going forward, I will be putting together a photo tour like I did for the Ka’anapali Beachwalk here.

For now, there are still a lot of photos in the set, which I will likely end up trimming down some more. There are almost no titles or descriptions yet, and many will still need to be edited and cleaned up. It will probably take days if not weeks, but I will slowly be making progress.

Stay tuned for more updates.

Mahalo.

Inspired by that idea, I put it to use in somewhat of a different matter. On the Photo Tag Match page here at Ka’anapali Dreamin’, I put the same concept to work as applied to the Hawaiian Islands. Specifically, it counts how many photos per island are posted to Flickr based on tags, and shows a grid and a chart to showcase the results.

At the moment, it looks like Maui has a rather comfortable lead (no surprise there). These numbers update about once an hour, and the Flickr home page, last I checked, seemed to be averaging about 3,000 new photos a minute. Grant it, those 3,000 new photos aren’t all about Hawaii, but after a few days you can see the numbers grow.

I’m also thinking of taking this one step further at some point. To expand it, I’m debating whether or not I want to do something similar for the top 10 cities in Hawaii from across the islands, and see what comes of that. If and when I put that together, I’ll post it here on the blog.

As always, let me know what you think. Again, you can find that new page here.

Mahalo.

There’s a new photo every day, so be sure to check back often for a quick diversion from your everyday routine. Also, if you miss a day or two here and there, you can go back and view previous days here.

As always, let us know what you think.

Of those, I started searching for particular shots of the night skies above Maui, and Hawai’i as a whole, and found some pretty spectacular pictures. Eager to share my starry photos within a group at Flickr of the same focus, I was a little hard-pressed to find one. I did try a few combinations and just came up empty.

So rather than closing my browser and calling it a night, I decided to create my first Flickr Group, and now it’s out there for everyone to see: Stars Over Hawai’i

While my true love is Maui, I can accept that all of the Hawaiian islands, floating peacefully in the Pacific Ocean, offer stunning views of the night sky, and the stars over head. Rather than isolate and limit photo stargazers just to one island, I wanted a place for everyone to share in the hunt for the best starry skies caught on film, er memory card I guess.

I realize that Flickr is not the only photo sharing site out there, so if anyone knows of any similar groups elsewhere out on the web, please do share as I’d love to see those photos regardless of where they’re posted. It’s almost too easy (yet never boring) to find pictures of magnificent Maui sunsets, but I just wish a few of those cameras would stay out a little later at night.