Netzflocken

This morning I’ve read a posting about a little html worldclock, putting the airport code and the local time for some cities on top of a picture with an equirectangular picture of the earth.

StartFragment Equirectangular projection of a composite satellite image (NASA)

Some words in advance - the guy who made this explicitly says that it was only a quick fun thing, so my babbling isn’t meant in any way as any kind of offence against him!

When I looked at the picture I thought: “nice”, and remembered one of my sons asking me for something similar a few weeks ago, to pin places where we’ve been or where friends live – something like a mini-frappr. Reading the comment of the posting where somebody asked for the source I thought by myself “why doesn’t he look at the html code” and as I was curious I did.

Wohoh, that was very 80s - if we would have had html then already.
Hey, we are in the 21st century, we are living in Web 2.0 wonderland, a place where JavaScript is meant for other things than just for the – aehm – reloading xxxxxx (censored by the ajax-department) of a page.

So I had this little idea of a web-service providing city names, latitude and longitude, timezone offset, maybe even more, and a JavaScript client fetching that data on startup, with a way to define and persistently store the personalized places you want to see, perhaps in a cookie (4k limit?) or on a server, dragging them to where you think they are if you don’t know the exact coordinates, which by the way seems to be a funny excercise to convert them to the corresponding ones on the picture…

After waking up I at least started with the JavaScript client, still with predefined cities, but no relo – aehm – ing after all.
Any suggestion is of course appreciated, as this was a quick one and for fun too.