Monthly Archives: February 2006

Blogging the Renaissance

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Announcing “Newarker.info”:http://newarker.info, devoted to covering the life and times of Newark, NJ from the perspective of the people who live here.

Newarker.info is just a blog and wiki for now, but I’m curious to see if we can ride the wave of the “renaissance” underway in the city of Newark. There seems to be a huge opportunity right now to build an online community for the city as more people take an interest in living and working here. The closest attempts I’ve seen are simply forums (“Newark Speaks”:http://www.newarkspeaks.com/, “The Newarkian”:http://www.newarkian.com/), which lack some of the more interesting features of the web, like RSS feeds.

My time commitments to the project are slim, so if any fellow Newarkers are interested in participating in a group blog, I’d welcome the help. :)

The Village Church is SO Web 2.0

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Check out the new “map widget”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/about/service/ on the Village Church site. This was really, really easy to do, but looks so much better than that static image we had up there from MapQuest for the past three or four years.

The “Google Maps API page”:http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ has more information, but, essentially, you just need to “sign up for an API key”:http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html (this is drop-dead simple — they don’t even ask for an email address), and then “walk through the documentation”:http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/. It wasn’t quite as easy as I was hoping at first; for example, you have to use Lat/Long coordinates rather than just a street address. But once you get the hand of hacking the JavaScript, it’s admirable how simple it is — our little interactive map is all of 14 lines of code and an extra div tag.

One gotcha I ran into when testing, though: IE will throw a nasty error when loading the page unless you “implement this fix”:http://www.ryangrant.net/archives/internet-explorer-cannot-open-the-internet-site-operation-aborted-google-map-api/. You just need to make sure the page loads your map using the onload event for the page body.