Google maps online, cont.
Well, as an experiment, I attempted to insert a Google map into our story Thursday about a fatal house fire. Staff artist Margaret Baxter already had put in a map, so if I screwed up or couldn't get the javascript code to work right, it wouldn't be any loss.
After some tinkering, I got it to work. I had to put the longitude value before the latitude value in the script, which is a bit unusual, and I had to add a couple of other lines of code to get the map to play nicely with Internet Explorer (v. 6; it still won't work under v. 5), but I did get it to work. So now we have a way of adding locator maps (fairly) quickly to breaking-news stories.
But that's probably all we'll use them for. I had a discussion with Stephen Paschall about the advantages and disadvantages of Google maps, and unfortunately, the latter tend to predominate. A summary of his concerns:
- Yeah, it's free, but Google doesn't guarantee either the quality of the code or the continuity of service.
- Our pages already have a ton of script in them, both in the page files themselves and scripts added by the server. Google's script for maps plays nicely now, but if Google ever changes its script, which it has said it could do, it could conflict with some of our scripts.
- Inline scripts of any kind -- I had to paste the code into the body of the story, then designate it as HTML -- would make it harder to adapt our content for wireless mobile distribution (cell phones, PDAs and so on).
- Relying on graphic content that's 1) external in origin and 2) involves scripts that can change is a risk when we're trying to create a unified, permanent database for all our content.
Besides, for a lot of our maps some of the features that Google Maps include -- you can drag them; you can zoom out or in -- just aren't all that useful.
We can, however, use the program in a pinch to generate stable *.jpg images of maps that we can include in stories on the Web and stick in our permanent database, and I can foresee our doing that more often, particularly with breaking news. So it's not useless.
We welcome other suggestions regarding tools of this type. But remember, I'm not much of a techie, so please use small words and type slowly. Thanks!
Comments (3)
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Maybe I'm missing something here, but why not just go to Google maps, hit prt screen, then save the google map to a jpg, and upload to the server? It's like a 3 second process. I don't see why you'd actually need the live google map to zoom in on, since theres usually only one level of clarity.
Posted on January 13, 2006 7:11 PM
Your pages have WAY more scripts than enough. Resist the urge to paste in anymore of them. (That archive thing is hard to argue with, either.)
Most of all, Beth's right. Static maps are easy and everyone can view them. ADA. User-friendly. Use a .jpg instead of code. Resist the cool new thing.
That being said, have you been to Veoh and see the cool video/internet TV toy? Cross platform. Way cool.
Posted on January 13, 2006 9:21 PM
Beth, if you'll re-read the next-to-last graf of my post, you'll see that's exactly what I said we'd likely do (when we're not using maps created by our own artists).
Sue: It's on my to-check-out list. I can't install the software at work (I don't have admin privileges), so I'll check it out at home. I've been thinking about videoblogging if I can get any of my vid programs to capture analog video coherently. (I didn't get a digital camera for Christmas, but I didn't get coal, either. I'm trying to figure out what that means.)
Posted on January 17, 2006 9:08 AM