Wednesday, 3 June 2009

Tidy up the blog

I've been writing this blog for nearly a year and a half. It is generally about my work with and use of the OpenStreetMap. A neighbour has started a blog about our allotment site and I wondered if we could put a map on the blog. Then it hit me. My OSM blog doesn't have an OSM map on it.

Well I had a fiddle around with the widgets that were available and plonked some HTML into one and hey presto, we have a map centred on the place where we live.

I have had a widget from FeedJIT on the blog for some time. It is based on Google maps and shows the location of readers of the blog. I like the idea and it has been interesting to see where people are reading the blog (all over the world actually, which is very gratifying) but I thought having two maps was a bit OTT. I took the FeedJIT widget off and speed has returned to the page. So, FeedJIT: a nice idea but be prepared to slow down your site.

I changed to a slightly broader layout to give the slippy map a bit more room. What do you think?

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Is there a link to the process for doing the map embed anywhere?

Chris Hill said...

Check out the Wiki page:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Blogger_map_widget

Gregory Marler said...

I noticed the map on your last blog, looks nifty. On my blog I have a manually created image with shadings of where needs to be mapped, but it gets out of date easily and now everywhere in Durham is mapped.

I'm thinking I might add a slippy map centred to a location specified in the last blog posting. Would be made into a Wordpress plugin at some point.