I spent a few hours Saturday evening playing with Google Maps. On the one hand, it’s probably not the most productive thing I could do with my time, on the other hand, all work no play…
One of the cool things about Google Maps is that they publish a programming interface so you can create interactive maps of your own. (Yahoo lets you do this too, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet.) Back in January, I spent some time playing with the interface and put together a map showing most of the chapters in STARFLEET in just a few hours. All in all, I probably ended up spending three or four times as much effort on the data as I did on the coding. (A lot of people couldn’t find their starships and wanted me to locate them. Hopefully they’ve since learned to not leave the keys in the ignition.)
One of the things missing from my original version was detection for browsers that couldn’t handle Google’s mapping code. I started out to fix that tonight, then discovered that Google had recently updated the interface, followed by the discovery that the interface had some hiccups with the latest version of Firefox.
A few hours tinkering and voila! The new map pages are ready to go!