Oz Bike: An Adventure Travel Log
This site exists to tell a story.
For 15 days in September of 2014, a father and son flew across the widest ocean, rented a pair of motorcycles, and drove them almost 4000 km along the east and south coast of Australia.
This is an exploration of digital geographic story telling. It is not a production service.
Technical Considerations
- This will fail on Firefox because it doesn't support the Australia\Sydney time zone.
- This might fail on Safari because it appears to bubble events differently than Chrome, however your mileage may vary. If it works on Safari for you, the times will be your local time instead of Australian time.
- This appears to work well on Chrome and Microsoft Edge. I developed it for Chrome, so for the most enjoyable experience, please use Chrome.
- If by chance the application becomes unresponsive, open developer tools and delete the cache and reload.
- Don't bother viewing this site on a phone. The current version is just too much of a bandwidth hog, from the high res photos to the StreetView integration, this site was designed for tablets and desktops with a strong network connection.
Deeper Technical Details
- This project was coded by hand by Court Crawford. Much credit goes to the documentation team at Google as well as various other programmers on the web. If I borrowed code, it's noted in the comments.
- Source code for this project can be found at https://github.com/uxcourt/uxcourt.github.io/tree/master/ozbike
- This site uses a cookie to store which marker you were last looking at.
- The project sources all content from a json file, and uses the Google Map Javascript API, as well as the StreetView API, to integrate maps along with the photos, videos, and sounds. Since both the json data set and the Google Map APIs can take a long time to load, and they have to work with each other, there have been challenging race conditions to troubleshoot and I'm not convinced I've solved all the problems yet.