Coordinate Maps

July 14th, 2005 | Jeff Boulter | General

Until recently, good interactive maps were something you could only get from desktop software like Streets and Trips or MapSource.

When Google Maps came out, it was quickly hacked for use on other websites. I didn’t think this would last, but when I did, I started playing with it myself. And then even more surprisingly, they opened up their API for everyone to use.

The utility here it to simply share some geographic data, plotting custom points on a map that they can look and and really understand where things are and how far apart they are - without installing CDROMs full of map data and deciding amongst a bazillion different mapping formats.

I’ve got my implementation in a good state now and I’m opening it up for others to play with.

My Coordinate Maps allow you to plot all kinds of data:

• A single point
• Points from the Geocache GCNHFG
• Aquariums of the World found by Geocachers
• Disney Benchmarks (dynamically scraped from this page)
• Some Geocaches in the San Francisco Bay Area from a GPX file

And there are number of not-so obvious features:

• Click a point for more info about it.
• Click and drag the map to move it around.
• You can use arrow keys, +, -, page up, page down for navigation
• GPX files of Geocaches will display with custom icons.
• GPX files can be uploaded in .zip format so they will load faster.

It gets kinda slow when you start trying to display hundreds of points, but it’s good up to a thousand or so. Check it out.