Source Code for WeLovePonies: A GeoDjango talk by Eric Palakovich Carr

This repository hosts the end result of my GeoDjango talk. Currently, this is the source code that was made during my talk on July 27th, 2011 (http://www.meetup.com/django-district/events/16015696/). Later, this will host the source code of the online version of my talk.

You can view the slides on slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/bigsassy/geotalk-presentation-8738796

INSTALLATION (apologies for lack of detail):

Install PostGIS using GeoDjango documentation

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/ref/contrib/gis/install/

Create the weloveponies database

CREATE DATABASE weloveponies WITH TEMPLATE template_postgis;

Clone this repository

$ git clone git://github.com/bigsassy/geodjango_talk.git

Create the virtualenv in the geodjango_talk directory

$ cd geodjango_talk
$ virtualenv --no-site-packages virenv
$ source virenv/bin/activate
$ pip -E virenv install -r REQUIREMENTS

Update the settings.py to include you database information

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.contrib.gis.db.backends.postgis',
        'NAME': 'weloveponies',
        'USER': '<your user name>',
        'PASSWORD': '<your password>',
    }
}

Sync the DB

$ cd weloveponies
$ python manage.py syncdb

Load the data

$ python manage.py shell
>>> execfile('../data/load_data.py')

Try it out:

1. Run the runserver command
2. Take a look at people at http://localhost:8000/ponypeople/people/
3. Take a look at the states visualization at http://localhost:8000/ponypeople/states/

IMPORTANT NOTE:

At this point the talk and code is a little incomplete. The biggest issue would be the incredibly large size of the JSON data for the states (about 22MB). Future versions of the talk will discuss techniques to solve this problem (generating custom map tiles, Douglas–Peucker algorithm, etc).

In the meantime, if you want a simplified version of the states you can use the XML feed from this page:

http://econym.org.uk/gmap/example_states.htm

The feed is here:

http://econym.org.uk/gmap/states.xml

A person at the talk I gave provided the link to me, but I'm ashamed to say I've already forgotten who exactly that person was. If you're reading this, drop me a message here on github so I can give you my thanks publicly in this README :)