behind AotW

After playing with the Timeline API last week, and having reasonable success, I thought I’d try another widget this week.

As a result, AotW now has another new feature: a Gazetteer for the Maryland Campaign of 1862. Please go try it and let me know what you think.

AotW Gazetteer screenshot

My gazetteer is an index of towns, structures, and geographic features–about 70 places so far–most often mentioned in the literature of the Campaign. Some are archaic names not found on modern maps, some are just hard to find. All are listed as links below a lovely GoogleMap.

Click a name on the list and we plot and center the location on the map.

I don’t intended this map to supplant the campaign or battle maps already on AotW. But I expect this would be a useful tool for someone trying to follow the action reading a book or other document on the campaign. Or someone planning a trip to the area, and plotting places to see. Or looking at the relationships between two or more points of interest.

Each location is (or will eventually be) tagged with additional information and links to associated events or people. This information is presented as a pop-up window on demand.

The map behaves in the ways you’d expect of a Google Map, so I hope it will be easy, even intuitive, to use.

I have been accumulating geo-data for towns and features in the AotW database for some time now, not knowing exactly how to use it. With the Google Maps API it was a fairly simple leap to put these places on a map. I’d like eventually to make more sophisticated use of both the data and the mapping API, but for now I’m happy with this fairly specific function.

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Techno-comments

• The Google Maps API is well documented and supports/is supported by a huge community of developers and other users. There’s plenty of help out there.
• I was up most of last Sunday night making all this work. Went round and round and round … the final code looks trivial to me now, but it wasn’t automatic.
• Like Perl, there are many ways to code something in Javascript. It turns out, also, that some of the Google calls I needed are “undocumented” and others did not work as I thought they should. Being open to trial-and-error and cribbinglearning from what others have done were key for me here.
• I’m not blaming Google or Javascript for my difficulties, per se. I hate Javascript, but it’s me, not it. Google is doing great things in this arena – my thanks to them.
• I used PHP code to pull the locations and geo-data from the database and write the Javascript used to invoke the API and its functions. I pass data between the html and the map on the link URLs. A little fat, perhaps, but effective. I tried several other methods. Too hard.
• If you view-source on my Javascript, please comment by private email and save me the public embarrassment, won’t you?