I’ve posted a page about how I built the museum directory mashup which I demonstrated during my talk at the UK Museums on the Web conference last week.
This started off as a KML file for displaying UK museums on Google Earth but the natural direction was to push it into a simple framework which queried a couple of web services for pictures and so on.
As you’ll see from my notes, this is not a complete museum listing and its accuracy is far from guaranteed BUT it hopefully demonstrates something vaguely interesting…The 24hr museum have just given me a complete CSV file of UK museums which I’ll munge in when I’ve got a spare second – I also hope to extend the app with some more API calls and other bits shortly.
Meanwhile I’ve got a frustrating and very weird problem which you may be able to help me with. If you look at the bottom of the mashup you’ll see there’s a link to the KML file – theory is you click on this and the museum listing gets superimposed onto your Google Earth app. Problem is I can’t get the link to work. The file is 100% absolutely, definitely there when I FTP in. I’ve renamed it, fiddled with the encoding, checked the syntax, uploaded other files into the same directory, changed the permissions…but I’m f*d if I can get the link to work. Anyone got any bright ideas…? It may save me some sleep…
Update: Yup, Frankie was right, it was indeed a MIME type problem. My hosting co. have now sorted this so the KML link should work. Huzzah. Thanks, Mr. Roberto.
Seeing as the error is different from your standard 404 error, the file clearly is there, but IIS doesn’t want to serve it. If it’s not permissions, then it could be the extension/mime type. Maybe IIS will only serve file extensions that it knows about?
Just downloaded the kml file now, it’s great. Look forward to seeing it with the better data from 24 hour museum