The problem
So yesterday I spent some time aggregating all my saved track and waypoint files from our trip to the Outback in August.
One problem with waypoints is that they're space-constrained. Thus I have lots of terse titles, "ROKAMP" (Rock Camp?) "MARYVGAT2" (Second Maryville gate?).
Another problem is that by the time I go back and try to do something with this information, three months has passed and names/places that made perfect sense to me then have melted away and I can't remember what I was thinking.
The first problem is structural, but the second problem could be helped with the collective memory of the four other folks on the trip.
The idea
People can jog others' memory. Maps can jog others' memories.
What would be a cool format for this? A blog, of course.
What I want is some software that processes each row of a waypoint file. It then calls the appropriate MoveableType/BloggerAPI and generates a blog item for each of those rows.
Waypoints from different trips/days/routes could be given their own category. It could play with the publishing date to control the ordering of the waypoints so that consecutive waypoints are displayed consecutively in the blog. The blog item would have the same title as the waypoint. The other information (GPS coordinates, elevation, etc) are stored in the body of the blog.
Since comments are "on", people can browse the waypoints and add what they remember to that waypoint. Before long, you have a fleshed out waypoint report.
It would be cool to somehow integrate a map (generated from OziExplorer) into all of this but that would be a considerably larger challenge.
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UPDATE (November 10th)
In searching for some example code to implement this project, I found a guy who wrote a clever system for submitting blog items via his handphone/camera combo.
Wish he had an email address on his site...my perl-generated blog items seem to have some subtle (?) problems with them.
What I could really use would be some hints on debugging MT-related applications in perl. Hell... I can't even find a proper error log.
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UPDATE (November 15th)
Being able to easily convert GPS Waypoints into blog items allows easier collaborative mapping.