Google Maps API


Yes, I'm late to the party, but hadn't had an excuse to experiment before. Last night, I started playing with the Google Maps API. Here's the result: http://www.lacobie.org/maps/places.html

The impetus for this was BlogMapper. Or the absence thereof. A couple years ago, before there was a Google Maps API (or even Google Maps??), i discovered BlogMapper, a Flash-based mapping approach, that automatically read geocoded blog entries to produce map points. This was fun, but the maps weren't as detailed as Google Maps.

So, now we've got cool, zoomable, satellite-imaging Google maps, but no easy geocoding! To get this test to work (which, by the way, shows all the places I've visited or lived in), I had to create a new XML file, with latitude/longitude information for each place. It's not reading from my blog.

Part of the problem here is iBlog. It doesn't have any "native" support for geocoding, that is, not fields for setting geo:lat or geo:long Note that there's another emerging geocode tag standard as well, rssGeo, but I don't find that one very attractive. Flickr uses the simple geo: namespace, and that's the way to go for me. Without native support, I had to embed these tags within a hidden span in the body of each blog entry. Well, this becomes inaccessible to DOM, as the body is all just "CDATA"; I can't programmatically read the tags ... at least, not as XML.

I think in the long run I should switch blogging programs, with something more "geo sensitive". But, this was a good experiment to start.

So, where in the world have you been?!

Back to:  

Posted: Tue - March 6, 2007 at 12:58 PM

Comments:

©