Group Map Blogs

Help us locate public WiFi hotspots in Durham, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro. All you have to do is submit the address and a bit more info into this form for Durham and this form for Chapel Hill.

Thanks for all the fish Anton! Ruby and I went over to the Zuiker’s residence and had a good time. In case ya’ll don’t know Mr. Anton Zuiker is a wonderful person. I value his friendship.

Back a few months ago I setup Chapel Hill Wireless with WordPress and a bit of Google Maps hacking. Then Anton bought the Durham Wireless domain and had lots of good ideas. He jumped right into the concept and improved it immensely. This is how successful online projects should work. I’m excited about the future of these sites.

Anton suggested we use a wordpress plug-in developed by a mutual friend called wp-gmap. Here’s what it does. When you create a post it contains two new fields for latitude and longitude. (you can get this info with Google Maps) When you publish the post the info you wrote, about a hotspot for example, gets put into a baloon above a marker on the sites Google Map. The code then centers the map on the new marker you just created. Thank you Justin Watt for this awesome bit of code. To think I was manually adding all those map markers!

The upshot of this is now lots of people can participate in the building of these two sites. These sites are now group map blogs!

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3 Responses to Group Map Blogs

  1. Justin Watt says:

    When you create a post it contains two new fields for latitude and longitude.

    Are you guys using the Geo Plugin, or do you just mean you add the lat/long as a custom field?

    With all this positive press, perhaps I should release the code as a proper plugin.

  2. brussell says:

    Your right Justin. I meant to say you have to add lat/long as a custom field. We\’re using your plug-in. You should offcially release it. :)

  3. mistersugar says:

    Brian, thanks for the kind words. It’s a pleasure being your friend and partner in mapping. Justin, your code is awesome. Please do make it into a plugin, when you have the time away from your new job, of course.