Wednesday, December 7, 2005

Fun With Maps

I have always wanted good maps for this blog that show where we camp and where we have gone. I rather dislike static maps and want an interactive experience using the maps. What I want is a way to navigate the reports of our travels by clicking the map to get more detailed information. I also want this to not be much work on my part. Impossible? Maybe not.
I am trying out the Google Map API to display data points on a map with an interactive user interface. The user can pan around and zoom in/out on the map with the data points still properly displayed. The user can also select a satellite view or a map view of the data. The data is from an XML database not from static images.

Here are links to individual trip campsite and route maps.

I've tried other static maps and haven't found anything that looks good and is easy to use mostly because they depend on a lot of effort to draw them manually. Then there is the copyrights problem, Google Maps may be the solution. One of the problems though is that it is difficult to use with blogger pages. So far that hasn't been fully eliminated so the map pages are just called from the blog.

A tool used to obtain lat/lng coordinates.

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