inkdroid

Adrian pointed out at the last chipy meeting that a formal API for GoogleMaps was in the works…but I had no idea it was this close.

After you’ve got an authentication key for your site directory, all you need to do to embed a map in your page is include a javascript library source URL directly from google, create a <div> tag with an id (say “map”) and add some javascript to your page.

    var map = new GMap( document.getElementById("map") );
    map.addControl( new GSmallMapControl() );
    map.centerAndZoom( new GPoint(-88.316385,42.247090), 4);

This took literally 2 minutes to do, if that. It’s a bit tedious that the token is only good on a per-directory basis, but I guess this is because of partitioned blogging sites where different users have different directories with the same hostname.

update: I guess I’m not the only one who finds the per-directory limit to be kind of a hassle.