foolfillment: the blog

Jim McDougall left a comment last night saying he’d added my blog to his map of ScotEduBlogs.

It go me thinking about my map of Scottish Schools again, there is already a list of ScotEduBlogs with certain pieces of data : blog’s name; blogger’s name; description; tags. If one of the bits of data was a postcode then it should be possible to output that to another application. I suddenly realised that there must be an easy way to get data into Google Maps dynamically using it’s API, how else would all of the mashups work?

So one quick search later and I’ve found this map generator from the Official Google Maps API blog which takes data from a Google Spreadsheet and creates a Google Map. I’ve not tested it yet but hope to find time soon. It should then be easy as pie to make a map for all schools in Scotland from a database that already exists, if I can get access to it.

With flickrvision going 3D this week that sort of toy was nearer the front of my mind than it might otherwise have been, it gave me this idea: what about a dynamically refreshing picture of the latest posts from ScotEduBlogs? While there’s a lot of activity I think you might still be looking for a while before it changes :).