Displaying Maps Without The API

By Tom Fitzgerald on February 23, 2010 12:10 PM | No Comments
Google's Map API is great for displaying a map on your web site. However sometimes there is an even easier way. I recently helped PageTronics Wireless with a new blog. They wanted a map on the blog that showed their 4 store locations. Normally I would do this using the Google Map API but today I wanted to show another way that is a little easier.

google-maps-ppc.gif

Continue reading Displaying Maps Without The API.

Click on Map listener

By Tom Fitzgerald on November 9, 2009 12:23 PM | No Comments
Today I wanted to share a quick example. You want a specific function to happen when someone clicks on your map. We're not talking about click on a marker to open a info window. Today I'm assuming you want to redirect someone to another page when they click on the map. 

To do this we create a listener, it's really easy and will take 40 seconds to explain.
Continue reading Click on Map listener.

Prediction : Google Music API

By Tom Fitzgerald on October 22, 2009 7:46 AM | No Comments
Ok this may be kinda obvious of a prediction but I think one day we'll have some sort of Google Music API. Today I just read that Google is coming out with a music search. Makes sense. They index and provide search for just about everything else. The original article is located here. I found it interesting that each artist will get their own page similar to how each company gets their own page on Google Finance. 

The end goal of course being to sell music, thats right - a direct threat against Apple's iTunes. I for one absolutely love this idea. Competition breeds excellence. iTunes sucks, I'm sorry but it's true. I don't love the interface and adding new songs is just a plain and I could go on and on. A lot of times friends will ask me to help with them with some iTunes problem. Every time I just cringe. One would have to hope that Google's alternative will be better and cheaper. 

I also found this to be very interesting, taken from the original article:

"Although Google won't get a share of song sales, it will collect revenue from advertising that will be shown with the search results, according to the people familiar with the plans"

Hmm, so Google won't be making money on the song sales themselves. That's interesting. So that means the original site will get the money, possibly offering referral money for affiliates? The whole thing sounds good. 

Anyway, somehow out of all this I predict some sort of API that will allow us to tap into this Google music goodness. Heres hoping!

JSON to Map

By Tom Fitzgerald on August 11, 2009 12:08 PM | No Comments

Today we are going to load JSON data thats being served from our Ruby on Rails scaffold. For this lesson I'll just concentrate on reading from JSON and display it on the map. In another lesson we'll show how to setup the scaffold. Then we'll go over how to make the markers and client list clickable. For an example on what this will look like, visit http://www.ccexperts.com/dev/json-map.html or view the image below.

json-to-map.jpg


Continue reading JSON to Map.

Google Weather API

By Tom Fitzgerald on August 2, 2009 8:58 AM | No Comments

Every web designer has at one point or another been asked, "How can I get weather on my site?" The old answer was to have a giant ugly weather channel gadget. Something that looked very nasty and you couldn't un-brand it no matter what. Some used an iframe to display external data and have it appear to be on their site. Lastly you could always just have a link that says 'click here for weather'. My goal was to get weather data from an external source and be able to customize how it looks. Fortunately now there are some great resources out there. I'm going with one that is my favorite, something extremely easy to use and customize - Google's Weather API.

weather-icons.jpg

Continue reading Google Weather API.

New Trends - Mashups & Google Base

By Tom Fitzgerald on July 27, 2009 7:48 AM | No Comments

I wanted to talk about some new trends that have been rising in popularity now. Then we'll go over how to use each of these resources to help your web site. Using these new techologies you can really add some amazing things to your sites. Its not always easy to see how these techologies can be used to increase visits - that's what we'll be going over. So lets get started.

Continue reading New Trends - Mashups & Google Base.

Plot points using Google Maps API - Part 2

By Tom Fitzgerald on December 29, 2008 7:44 AM | No Comments

Hey everyone! Sorry for the delay in posting this. It’s been a busy time lately. I’m spending half my time in New York which means I’m more than double behind. Anyway I previously wrote about how to quickly geocode a bunch of addresses using JavaScript. Then I would copy and paste those results into a new file that I named clients.xml. Warning : this is pretty inefficient I must say. If a new addresses was added you would have to go back and geocode all of them then copy and paste into clients.xml. I know this isn’t the best practice. The real answer would be to have a PHP script geocode an address and write into a database. However in the beginning I had 1000 addresses to geocode and not a lot of time to write an application. So this is really me just doing a quick mash up.

Continue reading Plot points using Google Maps API - Part 2.

Plot points using Google Maps API

By Tom Fitzgerald on November 15, 2008 7:42 AM | No Comments

In this tutorial I wanted to go over how to take raw data from just about any source and then plot the points on a Google map. This process can be done in any number of ways, I know myself I have done a little differently each time - mainly due to constraints or a customers request. In this particular request I had very limited time. I was asked to take data from their client management system and then place it on a Google map. Let's see how we should start such a process.

Archives