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.
3 Comments
Very nice. What a fantastic webmaster we have at TVC . . . :o)
“Kyleen”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/02/13/the-village-church-is-so-web-20/#1261, thanks. More like a fantastic production team, though. There are a good half-dozen other people who help make the Village Church web presence a reality. It’s been a real blessing to me to have such reliable and sharp people involved on a week-to-week basis.
Ken, that is sweet. I’m so implementing that somewhere!