As a follow-up on my geographical site map generator, I’ve coded up a very simple system that allows to navigate on a Google Map by area; although Google Maps are really pretty fun to use, I find that getting an overview of a well-defined area (country, continent, etc) takes quite too much effort by default.
So, after having looked up data for the areas the most relevant to my map, I wrote a simple area-selector as follows:
Inspired by MaxF’s recent cool photomap hack, I wrote my own version of the tool that works in a more general case: basically, you feed it with an XHTML page, and it will spider any other page linked from that page and extracts GeoURL data from them, and put them in a javascript file. When this javascript is called from an HTML page, it inserts a Google Map with markers for the various pages.
See how it looks on my personal site:
I just got a brand new PDA-phone last Monday, a Tréo 650 running PalmOS.
I have been reluctant to cell phones for a long while, finding them rather invasive: when you own a cell phone, people expect to be able to reach you on it pretty much all the time and everywhere. At some point, the trade off between this cost and the advantage of being able to call some people all the time and everywhere tipped the balance, and I finally decided to get a cell phone for my personal usage.