Mashup my blog - from blog to maps

A while back I was playing with Yahoo Pipes after Geo-ripping Wikipedia. This was all part of my on going fight against just doing Word, Powerpoint and whiteboard consulting and generally making sure that I still understand what I am talking about.

So the next challenge was obvious, take the RSS feed and put it up on a Google Map, hey its a mashup and we all know that they MUST use Google Maps :) For this next challenge I decided to abandon Yahoo Pipes for a while (mainly because it absolutely NAILS the server if you are looping through a big blog feed, and do it in the old "traditional" way of processing data in the single lump it comes in (the RSS feed).

My task was as follows

• Put the Geo tagged feed onto a map with the Google Maps API
  
• Generate a KML file for Google Earth
• Use Ajax in someway

I then added in another one (why not) which was to use the Google Maps API to actually do a search on those places I hadn't managed to rip from Wikipedia. Interestingly Google Maps don't enable you to search on the UK so having the Wikipedia information actually helped there.

So anyway after a few days of "downtime" working and lots of cursing about javascript I managed to get it all up and running. The Map your blog page needs an RSS or Atom feed that consists of posts that have (at this stage) just the placename in the title. It will then (after a shortish wait) display the Map and the summary of the trip information (distance between blog items) and the carbon footprint of that based on the mode of travel (again a single tag for the transport type at this stage). The final challenge I set myself was that all of the display elements would be done in a single page, no round-trip to the server.... no real reason I just wanted to try it.

To get you going try this simple UK to Wengen trip or there is a much messier one that goes all over the globe, that later one takes quite a while for Google to render. If you don't see it after 30 seconds just hit the button, I haven't done a "waiting for Google" bit yet, if you get bored just hit the button again.... Over on the right are a bunch of links including one to the KMZ file which should pop up directly in Google Earth (if you haven't got it download it).

I have to say it was really rather easy, apart from the Javascript issues. I used the Yahoo Javascript libraries to do the initially minor bit of Ajax in there, and Google Maps is fine. The paticular piece I liked was turning a KML file into a KMZ file in Java, worth a quick post on its own because of how easy it was.

Now I feel I can safely attack powerpoint for another couple of weeks.

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