My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now broken that. On the web, we used to use: <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg"> That opened the phone's photo picker…
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Back in November 2023, our crowdsourced website of memorial benches reached 30,000 entries. At the start of March this year, I was delighted when long-time contributor jrbray1 added this gorgeous memorial, taking us up to 40,000 benches catalogued: You can read more about Dr Judy John and her work on biodiversity. Using the power of advanced machine learning, it is possible to plot the growth …
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At the recent FOSDEM, I did a very quick lightning talk about our OpenBenches project. Sadly, despite the best efforts of the AV team, the video had a missing section. I took my own audio recording and zipkid took some photos, so I was able to recreate it using the Flowblade video editor. Enjoy! Many thanks to Edward Betts for running the dev room and providing the display laptop. …
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After my recent presentation at FOSDEM, someone asked a pretty reasonable question. What does it cost to run OpenBenches? It is, thankfully, surprisingly cheap! In part, that's because it is a relatively simple tech stack - PHP, MySQL, a couple of API calls to external services. It was designed to be as low cost while also being useful. Here's the breakdown: Hosting - £171 per year Our biggest …
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I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic. My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque, upload it to our site, and we share it with the world. Might sound a bit niche,…
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When Liz and I created the OpenBenches website, it was just designed to be a fun way for people to record memorial benches. Since then things have got out of hand and we now have over thirty-nine thousand benches recorded! Our plan was never to compete with something like OpenStreetMap. The OSM project is vast, complex, and brilliant - we are small, simple, and differently brilliant. But, over…
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My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a (somewhat) solved problem. Services like OpenCage, StadiaMaps, OpenStreetMap,…
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I love OpenFreeMap it is a quick, easy, and free way to add beautiful maps to your Open Source projects. With the latest release of MapLibre-GL I wanted to see if there was an easy way to use both to make an interactive globe with clustered markers. Spoiler alert: yes! Basic Globe Here's a basic example which I've trimmed down from this example. When you load the below code, you'll get a…
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I was delighted to be interviewed by the Volunteer Technologist podcast about our OpenBenches project. Huge thanks to Gene Liverman for having me on. It is available, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. …
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Way back in July 2017, Liz and I started OpenBenches.org. It was designed to be a fun way to record all the lovely memorial benches we saw on our walks. A few weeks ago, Stuart Orford added the thirty-thousandth entry! Here's what all that collective human effort looks like when plotted on a very exciting graph. Using a proprietary mix of AI and BIG DATA, I can confidentially predict that…
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My wife and I run a side project called OpenBenches.org - it is a fun little crowd-sourced memorial bench site. It's mostly fun, except when the bills come due! Most hobby sites and side projects don't cost a lot to run. Lots of services have generous free tiers to (ab)use, and they can pay well in "exposure". But OpenBenches is reaching a tipping point where it is slowly overwhelming us. …
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A few weeks ago, someone uploaded this memorial bench to our site: Photo CC BY-SA from Lewis MacKenzie. It is a perfectly pleasant little memorial poem. I wondered about its origins. A quick search shows that the opening couplet was used on war graves from 1916. But are its origins any earlier than that? One of the problems of trying to search old records - especially newspapers - is that…
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