Garmin Opie’s Treasure Chest Sweepstakes


True to his nature, Opie has been stashing away a whole lot of geocaching goodies for the coming winter. It came as no surprise, really, until we saw just how much stuff he had piled up. But after some conversations and coercion, he’s agreed to share his stockpile with his fellow cache creators at OpenCaching.com – but he wants to make it interesting. So throughout October we’ll be giving away his products as prizes to cache creators, and the prizes get bigger and better as more caches get created.

For starters, for every 100 caches created, we’ll give away an OpenCaching.com starter kit to a lucky participant until we reach 1,000 new caches. Once we top 1,000 new caches, we’ll give away a Dakota 20 to one randomly selected cache creator. Crossing the 2,000 cache mark will trigger an Oregon 450t giveaway. And as soon as we hit 3,000 new caches logged at OpenCaching.com, we’ll be giving away a GPSMAP 62stc – and we’ll give one of those away for every thousand caches created thereafter until the end of the month.

Every cache created qualifies as an entry, and to make things even easier, we provide a page to easily import caches you may have listed on other sites to help spread the word about your creations. And in the end, everyone comes out ahead because they’ll have thousands of new caches to find and log. While this specific sweepstakes is open to U.S. and Canadian residents, our offices around the world have been brainstorming – and announcing – exciting promotions for their respective countries as well.

The results templates out-of-the-box

We’ve been hard at work making improvements to the Google Custom Search Element that will enhance the look and feel of search results when users type into your custom search query box. You’ll see some of the fruits of these labors starting today. We’ve just launched a set of templates that take advantage of rich snippets markup to provide customized results layouts for specific structured data. Your markup can enhance the display of structured information in addition to enabling the powerful metadata features, such as Sort by Attribute and Restrict to Range that we released last year.

For example, there’s a Review template that will show ratings and expand on-demand to display reviews within a result as shown in the screenshot below:

This specific treatment is used when you use hreview and hreview-aggregate Microformat markup on your pages. Template rendering changes are automatic if you use the Element.

Templates that we now support include: People, Product, Recipe, Organization, Review and Review Aggregate. Try these out at our demo search site. Here’s an example of a Recipe result, using a custom theme.

For more information on markup that you can use for Google.com and Custom Search, please refer to our documentation. Don’t forget that we also support image thumbnails and actions. Further, if you are marking up your pages, you can verify that we recognize the right attributes by using our Rich Snippets Preview Tool.

We are constantly adding support for additional markup formats, so stay tuned. We’re continuing to add innovative features to the Element to help you turbo-charge your Custom Search results presentation.

What type of resource are you?

As developers of discovery and access tools, we run into the situation where we discover a resource in a remote catalog and have to understand the specific type of that resource so that our clients can work with it. This is not a geo-specific problem. No one who has opened a link that ended in .pdf has ever been surprised that the resource on the other end of the URL was opened in Adobe Reader. Somehow my system recognized this to be a document and saw I have a client installed that can work with that document. This was not because of the .pdf extension, but thanks to the fact that the PDF came to me with a MIME type (maintained by IANA).
I found an old blog post on the OGC website where someone asked about dropping OGC-specific MIME types in WMS 1.3.0. The question remains unanswered in the blog since May 10, 2005…
I pose that defining MIME types for various geospatial resources (from file storage types like ESRI Shapefile to web services like OGC WMS) will benefit users of these geospatial resources and developers alike. Here I’m not speaking of the data/images obtained from these services, but (in OGC case) recognizing the service endpoint as such.