As part of a larger article, I am currently building some tools that use geographical information. The first one is a pure JavaScript solution to link locations in a text to Google Maps and to show a small map under the text. You can see it in action by clicking the screenshot below.

All you need to do to use the script is get your own Google Maps key and embed the script in the page you want to analyse, giving it the ID of the main text element as a parameter:

You can customise the look and feel by writing your own CSS for the generated HTML and setting the addmap.config.width and addmap.config.height properties to resize the map.

Under the hood here is what happens:

• The script grabs the innerHTML of the element and runs it through the open YQL table of Yahoo Placemaker.
• It then takes the data, assembles the HTML and puts together the URI for the map
• The map gets displayed using the Google static map API

The code of addmap.js is available on GitHub.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Save BOSS shows that a good community fights for its survival.
• Smashing magazine has a very short and concise introduction to JavaScript scope – I am missing module patterns though – would have been more useful than explaining how libraries do it.
• A great video of Bobby McFerrin showing at the world science festival that the pentatonic scale is innate knowledge to people – regardless of their cultural background.
• En-code is a very cool online tool to encode code and mask invalid characters.
• A collection of nice JavaScript driven animations and tutorials how to do them
• Vermont Scientists are trying to measure happiness using blogs and twitter as sources. They’re building a device to do so called a “Hedonometer”. Well, I am doing my bit
• A good geek explanation of Chinese characters
• Apparently you can create an online shop with Google checkout in 5 minutes haven’t tried that yet, but let’s give it a go
• Fontplore is an interface to walk through different fonts with a minority report feel to it.
• Give a geek WiiFit and he’ll try to game it, not game with it – check out what happens if you alternately play a Wii Fit character with two people with a weight difference of 100 pounds
• It is now easier to making image overlays in Google Maps with GGroundOverlay and GGeoXML
• The HTML5 group of the W3C has an interesting Web Database Draft for HTML5 – it is a SQL interface to data sources on the web, much like YQL but without the intermediate server.

Things that made me happy this morning:

• The Developer Evangelist Handbook is going nuts. 10300 hits yesterday, so far 12400 today.
• Amazing photos of naked Obama and unicorns – in case you wondered if the web is sane by now.
• Reconstructing 3D models of cities from Flickr photos is a pretty amazing research/tool/design.
• Proof that the quick brown fox really jumps over the lazy dog%
• CSS Prism is a tool to analyse CSS files and show the colours used in them
• Snook blogged about CSS text rotation and dug up the old IE transitions as a fallback – they are terrible though.
• 100 things our kids may never know about is a cool list of tech nostalgia
• BootXChanger allows you to change the Apple logo when your computer boots up
• Gheat is a pretty cool tool to overlay heatmaps on Google Maps

Over the course of the weekend I finished polishing GeoMaker and uploaded the source to GitHub. So now you can use GeoMaker or its API and also host them on your own server.

The new features include:

• Embedding of Geo microformats into a text when originally you wanted to analyse a text and intermediate text display.
• Turning RSS feeds into maps (much like RSS2Map) with an intermediate filtering step
• Total re-code (includes instead of one massive chunk, configuration and labels file)
• Help and About and Developer docs

See the changes in action in the following screencast (the design of the RSS preview has changed since – more obvious now):

The next steps will be to allow for multiple map providers. Got any other ideas?

• Download GeoMaker on GitHub
• Visit GeoMaker

In preparation for my upcoming tech talk about Yahoo Placemaker I thought I have a bit more fun playing with the API. The main thing I wanted to create is a tool that makes it easy to either get geo content from some text as microformats or as a map to copy and paste without having to read lots of documentation.

Enter GeoMaker. In just three steps you can either get from URL to map or from text to map. If you add the site address to analyze as a URL parameter it even goes down to two steps :)

I’d love to get feedback and see how we can improve this. I’ll release the code on GitHub in case you want to host this yourself once I got some more iterations done on it.