Google Maps in the Encyclopedia

9 September 2006

Since the site started, most of the places listed in the Encyclopedia have had links to their location on Streetmap. I’ve now replaced these with a map from Google Maps which shows the location in the page, which is more convenient.

Here are two examples: The Tower of London and Mumbai. The maps work OK on my Mac, but I did have problems displaying the pages in Internet Explorer on Windows — please try and let me know, as hopefully it’s just my PC…

Also let me know if you find anything else invconvenient about it, or that could be better. There are many improvements I could make over time now this is working.

I should just thank Jonathan Stott for his PHPCoord code which helped me translate the Streetmap OS Grid coordinates into latitude and longitude, and the Mapstraction folks whose Javascript code made the mapping easier to implement.

And I haven’t forgotten about my plan to allow people to adopt Encyclopedia pages and write summaries for them — the mapping code was rather messy in there and I had to tidy it up before letting anyone loose!

10 Comments

First Reading

Australian Susan  •  Link

Clicking on the T of L link above whilst in IE did not work - it initially displayed and then went to the stanard IE can't display page with an interim flash of an error msg I cld not read. However, firing up Firefox and using that was perfect.

Alan Bedford  •  Link

There is a very nice benefit to using Google Maps - we can get an aerial photographic view of these sites, albeit as they stand today.

dirk  •  Link

More or less the same problem as Susan, although it didn't even initially display -- the trouble is that I don't have Firefox to deal with it...

dirk  •  Link

Tried Firefox on another machine -- Linux, not mine -- and everything works fine. For me the problem remains though...

Phil Gyford  •  Link

Thanks folks - there does seem to be a problem with Windows Internet Explorer, which I'm looking into fixing... more updates as I have them!

IronRoads  •  Link

Using Firefox 1.5.0.6 on Windows 2000:
- Mumbai, no map control is visible at all.
- Tower of London, The control is intermingled with the text. You can see the navigation and view buttons and the powered by google icon, all superimposed on the text. No map or control outline is visible.

Using Mozilla 1.7 on Solaris 9:
- Mumbai, Only the outline of the control appears (looks like a large rectangle in the middle of the page)
- Tower of London, map appears and functions normally (huzzah!)

GrahamT  •  Link

Firefox 1.5.0.6 on Windows XP Professional SP2.
Mumbai completely blank, even with refresh; Tower of London - working normally

Ben B  •  Link

I.E.6 WinME.
Tower map displays perfectly.
Mumbai header OK but no map.
See http://www.google.ca/maphp?hl=en&…
and drag the slider down notch by notch until Mumbai displays.

Aqua  •  Link

many thanks I now can see the Gnats on a Dock leaf.

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