A Tasty Pixel » Webapps

Introducing The Cartographer Clipper: Clip any website to Google My Maps

I’m pleased to present The Cartographer Clipper, the perfect accompaniment to The Cartographer!

The Clipper is a bookmarklet that works in any modern web browser, and lets you clip information from any website — hotel directories, restaurant websites, even forum postings — to Google My Maps. Addresses are auto-discovered via some super-sleuthing magic, images pulled out and any selected text is placed into the description.

You can save to an existing map, or create a new one on the spot.

It’s great for doing travel or errand research — find a good hostel (or just the closest Apple store!), just click the “Clipper” button, then “Save”, and it’ll appear on your maps in The Cartographer, all automatically.

It’s free for use, and all it needs is any modern web browser, and a Google account.

Install The Cartographer Clipper here.

It’s still in beta, so do let me know if you have any trouble!

Experiences setting up Potion Store

I wrote recently on some options I was considering for A Tasty Pixel’s store. Rather than going with a service like Kagi or eSellerate, I decided to build the store upon Potion Factory’s Potion Store, which is free and open-source — the latter being a big draw, as it means infinite customisability. Potion Factory have done a wonderful thing for the indie Mac developer community! Together with PayPal’s ‘Website Payments Standard’ service, which offers quite reasonable fees, all my needs were addressed.

So, I thought I’d follow up by writing about my experiences putting it all together.

Sort your Flickr photostream

Flickr has a limitation that your photostream is ordered by the date you uploaded your photos, and this order can’t be changed. If you’ve done a big import of photos – say, from iPhoto – then they could show up in your photostream in any order.

There’s been some talk about the issue, with one suggested solution being to manually set the ‘posted’ date of every photo to the ‘taken’ date. A utility exists to do this, but it has some major limitations, including a difficult user interface and limitation that causes the process to fail if you have any photos that were taken before the date you set up your Flickr account.

So, I’ve made a utility specifically for sorting a Flickr photostream. It should be fairly user friendly, and provides the ability to backup and restore your photo metadata, in case you ever want to revert.

Check it out here: SortMyPhotostream, or get access to the SortMyFlickrPhotostream source.

Leave a comment below if it’s useful to you.