behind AotW

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I realize I’ve broken permalinks to previous posts here, and I’m sorry for the inconvenience. I hope to have figured out a mod_rewrite redirect soon to catch those. Any apache or wordpress gurus out there who can help me with that?

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?

I heard it said that there isn’t enough interaction on our blogs. Too few comments. I must admit to you that I’ve had just over 1,100 comments submitted in the last month, and not shown them to you. I apologize. My protective filtering software, by Akismet, has been blocking them.

Let me make this up to the contributors who wanted to say something, but couldn’t. I’ll post their thoughts now. I can do this fairly easily because, remarkably, hundreds of commenters used exactly the same phrases. But then, how many ways are there to compliment a simple blogger?

I'm really impressed!
Great job, webmaster! Nice site.
May we exchange links with your site?
Best site I see. Thanks.
I just don't have anything to say right now.
Thanks for interesting informations and good luck.
Beautiful online information center. greatest work¦ thanks.
Hello Jane, great site!
I like your site
Your home page its great.
So interesting site, thanks!
HI! I love this place!
i try to find something at google.com and take it on your site¦thanks
Nice site!
Great work!
Thank you!

and my favorite

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.:)

Who wouldn’t appreciate this kind of support from their readers?

I also thank these nice people for submitting all those links and suggestions about pharmaceuticals, intimate relationships, texas hold-em, and extra income. I’m sure these are all valuable references. It’s a shame the filter won’t let them through.

I wish there was something I could do.

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