david hall

As I mention in my Info section, I have long thought I''d like a Google Map section to geo-tag photographs to, in a similar manner to Flickr and Panoramio. I like the Flickr implementation, but the quality of mapping isn''t as good as Googles'. Well now it''s landed (example only - no valid API key).

From the map points there are commonly links to slideshows of photographs such as those presently run off Lightbox, or those on Flickr and Picasa. Although Flickr seems to be the popular one, Picasa has the advantage of being viewable on the iPhone as well and is very suitable for this purpose.

The new page is built on the Google AJAX API loader, the tutorials seem to use the old code, but they''re not too bad to follow and the new is backward compatible, so mashing the two together was OK.

Having been through the Google Concepts and examples, I found the best way of learning and getting the page to work, was the long established method of unashamedly picking-over other site''s code. Having enabled the debug menu in Safari a while ago, I've actually found myself using the Javascript console, a whole new language to me.

One thing I have noticed in this though, is that the webkit Inspect Element sometimes messes-up the code - the View Source gets it right, as does Opera''s Console.

Hopefully as the new page grows I will learn how to implement the zoom zones to reveal more specific map points within groups (trips) as the magnification (and requirement) grows.