[Herts] Google maps

[Ian Gregory]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 09:29:30AM +0000, Steve Clark wrote:
 
> First of all thanks to Ian for his maps demo.

No problem. If I had been better prepared I would have worked out
in advance how to display stuff in a big font so people could see,
but I was only really using the screen to remind myself what to say.

I did forget to mention something about the Google XML Sitemap
protocol. When I showed how to get various statistics for your
site I forgot to say that you have to "verify" your sitemap before
you can see the stats. The way that happens is that Google give
you a "key" and you have to create a file (can be zero length)
in the root of your website called google$KEY.html - this way
they know that you "own" the site. They don't want people being
able to view stats for other people's sites.
 
> I had a thought after I left. If we wanted to create our own map of
> members that did not use Frappr then we could use ability to encode a
> location in a web page as described at
> 
> http://geourl.org/add.html
> 
> Then we could have a process that checked a list of member sites, which
> we already have, and added flags to a Google map. This would rely on
> everyone having a site that they could modify to include to location.
> For those who don't have a personal site maybe we could we could set
> them up a page each on the LUG site.

I was thinking about adding a location to my site anyway, but I am
not quite sure yet. Obviously if you ran a website for, say, a B&B
place, it would make sense to give the location of the B&B. If you
are just running a personal homepage then what location do you give
if any? I don't reveal my home address on my website so I may not want
to add a geotag which pinpoints it. I might want to give the location
of the server (somewhere in Docklands) or no location.

And then if I had a page about Ben Nevis on my site I might want to
add a geotag locating Ben Nevis just on that page - but presumably
you can have as many page specific tags as you want. I am still
learning about the subject. There are lots of links from the Wikipedia
page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoTagging

By the way, it seems that Google have just released a Mac OS X
client for Google Earth - addressing a long standing complaint
of Mac users.

Ian

-- 
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/