David Shanske

The route started out along State Road 55 past the Neversink Reservoir, and spurring off onto Route 55A, which goes along the other side of the Roundout Reservoir.

Spurring onto Sundown Road, we headed into the Sundown Wild Forest. The 30,100-acre Sundown Wild Forest covers a large swath of the southeast Catskills, including several ridges and 10 mountains over 2,000 feet. We had planned to stop by the Peekamoose Blue Hole, but missed the turnoff and only saw it from a distance. It is a depression in the streambed rock of the Rondout Creek, a unique natural feature formed by sand and swirling gravel in an ancient whirlpool.

The route continues into the Slide Mountain Wilderness, which encompasses more than 47,500 acres and is the largest and most popular wilderness area in the Catskill Forest Preserve.  This brought us into the Town of Olive, which is inside the Catskill Park. The Catskill Park is 700,000 acres, of which 287,000 acres are owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve.

Heading through forest, we finally reached state road 28A and the Ashokan Reservoir. The Reservior, part of the NYC water system, and is the city’s deepest reservoir at 190 feet. It was built between 1907 and 1915.

The Ashokan Reservoir, of all the ones we’ve visited in the last year, has the most walking and biking trails. This includes the 11.5 mile Ashokan Rail Trail. While I’m always disappointed at the loss of rails, this was well executed.

We stopped to eat our lunch at the Woodstock Dike Trailhead. It was windy, and it is cold this year. But at some point in the future, we may return to walk the trail further.

The return trip looped around the remainder of the Reservoir, before cutting back to Accord, NY.  When my mother was a child, she stayed at bungalow colonies in Accord.

We passed through Ellenville on Route 209 back to our starting point.

There are no fancy features in this version. It is a major version shift because it removes and rewrites several features. Specifically

• Removes the Kind On This Day Widget, which is now in the new Tempus Fugit plugin.
• Rewrites the rewrites…all the Kind rewrites are done much much effectively. This includes things like /kind/checking/2020, for example.
• The media fragment script, which adds the timestamp to the URL when playing a video or audio file, is not enqueued on AMP loads, per a PR received.
• Uses new features introduced in 5.5 and for which I added compatibility functionality in this plugin to improve the archive page descriptions. I also rewrite and improved what they say for multi-kind archives… /kind/eat, drink or such.

In the previous version, I had added automatic rewrites for /kind/food, which displays both eat and drink, /media for the watch, listen, play, and read posts, and /reaction for bookmark, repost, like, and favorite, allowing you to archive by topic.

I have more tweaks coming in future, but always moving forward.

The smaller items:

• Add MapQuest’s own API in addition to the existing OpenMapQuest Geo Provider, which is a hosted Nominatim.
• OpenMapQuest and LocationIQ are now descendants of the nominatim provider, as they all use the same output format.
• Add Pelias Provider. OpenRoute is a hosted instance of Pelias, so the OpenRoute class inherits its workings from this class, but allows for using a self-hosted Pelias provider, though I didn’t test that.
• Fixed an issue with the Google geo return.
• Reviewed all geolocation APIs and updated the returns.
• Standardized the country codes returned on all APIs to the ISO2 2 letter country codes.
• Standardized the addition of region codes, special casing US and Canada.
• Added a Home Country setting to allow omitting the home country from location displays. Example: If you live in the United States, it won’t say New York, NY, US. It will just say New York, NY.
• Support generating street addresses for countries where the house number appears after the street name, instead of assuming it will always be before.
• Tried to put labels on the weather form fields for accessibility.
• Added historic weather lookup to Micropub enhancements.
• Add a bulk action to lookup and add location(private by default) for multiple posts.

The biggest piece is the introduction of the location taxonomy. This is different from the proposed venue taxonomy. Location is a coarse location, whereas venue is a fine location.

The new Location taxonomy is designed with three levels. Country, region, and locality. Locality is the city, village, or town. So, the system is not designed to go down more than 3 levels. By default, this allows for archive pages like /location/us/ny/new-york for all posts in the locality or city of New York. Or /location/us/ny for all posts in the region or state of New York.

When you look up any location, it should automatically create the terms reflecting that location. This is where the problem comes in. Despite my attempts to standardize the returns from the reverse geolocation lookup, not only will the returns vary by provider(if you switch), but the return will not always match what you’d expect.

For example, Rome sometimes shows up as the Italian, Roma. So, I am already working to try to improve matching different versions of the same location. But this may require some manual action(merging, marking, etc not sure yet) to garden. But you have this same problem when trying to organize your digital music collection, or anything you categorize. The goal is to make the need as infrequent as possible.

What might be next? Other than 4.4.1, which will address some of the more obvious issues I discover as I use the feature myself(or from others), possible features related to this include:

• Displaying the location taxonomy instead of the location text.
• Functions to improve the archive experience, possibly if the theme is aware

Curious to see opinions as people have them.