About the Website

As an individualist and Computer Scientist, I couldn't bear to simply use Wordpress and adapt it to my purpose, especially since I already have a perfectly good (and very colourful) pre-existing web journal, Hype Dark.

The website is a simple PHP, MySQL and CSS site. All posts are sourced from the Hype Dark database but filtered for the Geek On a Bicycle tag.

The CSS used to provide the theme for this website is an adapted version of the K2 theme for Wordpress. Under the terms of the GNU GPL, I am required to provide the source for any derivative work - this can be found here.

The photo gallery uses a mootools script which allows photos from Picasa Web Albums to be displayed on any site. I prefer Picasa Web to Flickr as a repository for photos outside of Facebook since it is relatively painless to upload and browse photos.

Location Updating

To allow location updates while on the road, we made use of Twitter's ability to accept SMS messages since running our own SMS gateway would have proven too costly. Twitter on the other hand accepts tweets sent from a registered mobile phone free of charge.

Since using my O2 number to text Twitter from abroad would cost a stupid amount per message, I will be using a Kenyan sim card from Zain which, oddly enough, lets me send text messages to international numbers at a tenth of the cost. (Update: This is failing epically, at least in Egypt, where the Zain simcard won't allow me to connect to a local network. For the moment, texts are being sent manually via a friend to Twitter!)

In order to determine my location, I'll be using a dedicated GPS unit - a Garmin ETrek Vista HCx, a basic rugged navigation unit with mapping capability. The device has a cold start acquisition time of around 40 seconds, and a theoretical battery life of 25 hours. This should hopefully allow me to acquire coordinates for quite a few weeks before running out of charge!

These coordinates will then be SMSed as a direct message to a dedicated Twitter account.

Direct messages are collected from Twitter via a PHP script, executed daily by a cron job. The script uses the terribly incomplete php-twitter wrapper class which has been modified so that it actually works for direct messaging! Source available here.

Statistic Collection

Statistics are collected manually because the best alternative solution would be to use Daytum but that lacks the ability to embed graphs in external websites. Instead, a MySQL database is used to collect statistics, coupled with the Google Charts API to display the data. Statistics are texted to Twitter and then scraped in the same way as for location.

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