:: Aletheia ::
Blogging Craig's mental space...

Talk about serendipitous...

As I lay in bed, woken by mozzies at 3:00am three nights ago, I thought, "I'd love to make a map of our travels..." Spurred on by 4 hours of manually creating a "By Country" index for our travel blog I began to imagine a map reminiscent of Indiana Jones movies. Flying planes and all.

And what did I find the next day? Lifehacker reviewed and linked to a couple of pieces of software that leverage google maps to do just that.

This is what I ended up with. I'm sure it'll become an important part of the Our Crazy Travels interface. Gotta love those visuals!

My brief mapping experience

I ended up trying two of lifehacker's suggestions as well as one mentioned in the comments. Supplement the lifehacker reviews with my thoughts.

My Pin Map link
Mentioned in the comments. Currently bare and tricky to navigate. I put in two locations, but my map remained empty. Gave up after looking around for a reason and not finding one. See my abandoned map.

Community Walk link
Favoured by lifehacker, Community Walk (CW) was my next attempt. I found it easy to add waypoints but I kept having problems with the screen layout, items flowing onto one another, etc. I browse with Firefox on an Apple 12" G4 Powerbook: the small screen may have been a problem.

I had multiple problems with the "click to move" option. Sometimes it wouldn't work. Often it would move my map so I couldn't click where I wanted to! I had to move NZ half way around the world then back again.

The application took a liking to leaving extra markers around the map. I guess they were from previous displays. I had 2 "New Zealand"s at one point...One was located just east of South America.

This was my result and I was (finally) happily prepared to put it onto the blog.

Community Walk Map - Our Crazy Travels

Unfortunately I couldn't get Samoa on the map. Even after I moved the marker a little west of the dateline, the software insisted on moving it around the world so viewers would have to view all my markers and then scroll far west onto a blank map with only Samoa.

After stuffing around for an hour, this was too much. Geek to live, huh?

In the end it proved too buggy for me. Even revisiting to place the code on this post annoyed me. Good luck to them though; it could become a good product.

Wayfaring Link.
You always find what you're looking for in the last place you look.

I haven't experienced any of the bugs that I had with CW, the map displays nicely on the blog (have a look) and interacts quite well with my index. I still have a few issues with Samoa...It seems to be a problem nation with google maps!

The screen-feel of Wayfaring.com is much nicer on the eyes. Rounded corners do mean something after all. Site navigation can still be a little confusing but in general it makes more sense to me than CW.

Lifehacker praises CW for its flickr integration and I agree. In general CW does have more features than Wayfaring. The flickr feature was excellent, but one can add common HTML to Wayfaring maps and it's all worked fine for me so far. On Wayfaring.com you can also imbed video, although I do try and think about my non-broadband viewers. Until I get a video camera, that is.

Lifehacker didn't like Wayfaring's "Waypoints" system but they seemed simple to me: Write a name, click on the map, add some tags, add your comments/HTML. Not too tricky. CW doesn't support tags...And there are some greasemonkey extensions for Wayfaring that I've gotta go have a play with.

I never got my Indiana Jones planes, trains and automobiles, but I'm placing my bets with Wayfaring and will let you know if I change my mind.

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