Mapping Hacks

View Your Photo Thumbnails on a Flash Map #39

Chapter 4, Mapping (on) the Web

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175

HACK

Adding Location Tags to Radio Userland

For Radio Userland, it’s a bit of an easier ride to get to RSS2+Geo. The

Location tool (http://radio.weblogs.com/0100875/location/) uses Radio’s call-

back mechanisms to add latitude and longitude inputs to the post form and

includes those entries in the RSS file. Simply download and install the tool,

and you’re all set.

The Location tool also defines a

<%locationlink%> tag, which displays a

small globe linking to a map of the location specified. You can add it to your

itemTemplate.txt like so:

<%locationlink(<%itemNum%>)%>

Congratulations, your weblog posts are now location-enabled and ready to

be mapped, for example, with RDFMapper

[Hack #21]! See http://www.

mapbureau.com/rdfmapper/ for more on this, or the next hack “View Your

Photo Thumbnails on a Flash Map”

[Hack #39] for a related hack.

—Mikel Maron

HACK

#39

View Your Photo Thumbnails on a Flash Map Hack #39

Showing the original locations of your photos on a map is a neat trick, but

worldKit lets you go one further, by showing the image thumbnails right on

the map itself.

worldKit is a web mapping toolkit that runs in Macromedia’s ubiquitous

Flash Player. With a little bit of XML, you can configure worldKit to plot a

geotagged RSS feed on a map of your choice. We’ll look at using your favor-

ite blogging tool to record the places where your photos were taken, and

then having worldKit show a thumbnail of each photo in the right place on

the map. As an example, check out El Oso’s photo map at http://www.el-oso.

net/travels/. You can download worldKit and find documentation and exam-

ples at http://brainoff.com/worldkit/.

We’re going to presume you’ve already set up your RSS feed to include lati-

tude and longitude. If not, start with “Add Location to Weblogs and RSS

Feeds”

[Hack #38]. Once that’s done, we’ll configure the RSS 2.0 feed in both

Movable Type and Radio Userland to include a pointer to the thumbnail of

the photo you want to map. If you don’t use either of these blogging tools,

read on anyway; the same principles can be applied to any blogging system

that lets you fine-tune its RSS output. Finally, we’ll set up worldKit, and

point it at your geotagged RSS feed.