My name is Hennes. I am a freelance web
developer with a passion for panoramic photography. This website is my technical
playground. I called it "panosite", because it shows my work on panoramic pictures. More than that,
it features what I spend a lot of time on and what I call Repanography (derived from
Rephotography).
I started this site back in late 2006. During university I took panoramic pictures of many of the university's classrooms and used them for a multimedia project. My professor was absolutely fascinated with the result - and decided to offer me a deal. So the university became my first customer. After developing a website with a virtual tour through the university premises, using PHP, I wanted my own panoramic gallery.
So www.panosite.de was born. By that time, I put over 130 panoramas online. But due to a missing admin frontend I had to bring all of them online manually - a painstaking workflow (called phpMyAdmin). I was out, taking new panoramas more frequent than I was willing to work with my own application to upload them. Unfortunately, except for some minor changes, the site remains unchanged since then. See it yourself, it is still online.
Times have changed. Over the years, I had different jobs at different companies, I learnt a lot and got better with panography
and web development. In 2007 I started to take panoramic pictures at exactly the same spot, over and over, to document change.
I was so curious how two panoramas, taken at different dates, would look like when placed right next to or above each other.
Not only was this something, my old PHP website was not able to model. I also had grown tired of the cumbersome
uploading process mentioned above.
So I rewrote www.panosite.de from scratch and started hosting its development
branch at dev.panosite.de. There is no production or master branch yet...
This site hasn't seen any new features since March 2015. Although there are tons of things I would like to implement,
change and improve, time is the limiting factor (as always).
Summing it all up, this site is quite an accumulation of
things (read: features) of what mattered to me during its development: login and authentication to
keep selected panoramas private, a timeline for repanographed pictures (I call it "split mode"),
so that you can jump through time in one panorama (see examples
Darmschleimerei vs. Home24 Outlet or
Zentralvieh- und Schlachthof).
Panoramas are organized in categories and there is a full featured admin
frontend (which, of course, you cannot see).
In future, I would love to serve images in different resolutions as well as different projections, e.g. for print.
Eventually there might be tag and search functionality, a design that actually lives up to its name etc...
This site is running Ruby on Rails. It is using Amazon S3 for image data and (currently) is hosted on Heroku.
I deploy this site from its development branch, hence the "dev" subdomain and a prominent
in the header. Right, it is under development, or rather stuck
during development.
Nevertheless feel free to nag about anything that strikes you or leave constructive feedback, either using plain old
email or filling in the the feedback form on the left.
I REALLY appreciate ANY feedback.
You can find a Changelog as well as a list of the latest panoramic picture additions.
...the following, half-baked/unfinished features: