In which Lex gets the tiniest bit geeky
As I've said before, I'm more of a content (the noun, not the adjective) guy than a tech guy, and I am usually content (the adjective, not the noun) to leave coding issues to Charlie Stafford and Stephen Paschall. But Charlie just introduced me to a new hack so cool, and so simple, that I had to try it out and, when I succeeded on the first try, brag about it share it with you.
Google Maps now has an API (tech-ese for a coding tool) that lets you put a Google Map on any Web page on any server to which you have access. You need a Google account (if you have a Gmail address, you're covered), and you need to agree with their terms of service, which basically state that you won't use the hack to, like, identify the best places in town to buy drugs or stalk your ex.
Also, you need to clear it with Google first if your daily traffic exceeds a certain number. I wasn't clear on whether any one page on our site might exceed that number, so I performed my experiment -- pasting a map of Palo Alto, California, into a blog entry -- on my personal blog, which I know poses no threat to Google's server capacity.
My personal blog is powered by Blogger, and the code supplied by Google to generate the map made Blogger choke and puke. (Which is, well, funny, inasmuch as Blogger is owned by Google, but I digress.) So I had to go into the index page of my blog and paste the code in. And I still got it to work in under two minutes.
So I hope you're going to start seeing a lot more maps in online N&R stories very soon.