Well, thanks for asking. Yes I have.

Veggie Friendly now features a Google Map of vegetarian friendly restaurants in Sydney and Melbourne (i.e. restaurants that score VVV or higher).

The Google Map shows balloons that mark the location of the posts. If you click on a marker it brings up a speech bubble. The speech bubble shows the title of the post which has the name of the restaurant, plus its V rating. It also includes a link to the original post. You can zoom up or down on the Map, and also move the focal point up, down and left and right.

I was excited when I heard that Google had released maps of Australia for use with its Google Maps API, and that you could make a Google Map mash-up by overlaying your own information on to the map.

My excitement began to wane when I started reading the instructions for the Google Map API. Nine frustrating hours later I realised my best hope was to tap into the Wordpress plugin community and see if someone smarter than me had already figured out how to autmatically link post information to a map.

After a bit of digging I found two options: Yongfook’s Plug and Play Google Map and Cyberhobo’s Geo Mash-up.

If you’re a wordpress user, here’s what you do:

Both plugins rely on another plugin called Geo. You need to download Geo and save it your plugins directory. Then you go the plugin screen and activate it. Geo adds a custom field to your posts which lets you add geocode tags (latitude and longitude). You can also preset the coordinates for a particular location if you’re going to use it repeatedly.

Geo does not give you the geocode data. For that, you need to find yourself a free geocode service. So far as I can tell, Google is still not offering Australian data so I’ve been using Travelgis with a little help from the Sensis postcode finder.

It’s probably best at this stage if you add the geocode data to a couple of posts. You’ll also need to visit the Google Map API page and grab yourself a unique API key.

The next step is to download either Geo Mash-up or Plug and Play. I initially tried Geo Mash-up and an earlier Google Map mash-up program by Yongfook. Neither worked - Geo Mash-up would activate in my plugin screen, but when I tried to run it I got a message saying that Geo needed to be activated. Yongfook’s original program simply didn’t appear in my plug-in screen. Finally discovering some programs that would do exactly what I wanted, and then not being able to use them was really frustrating. I left a comment on both sites, but assumed that the developers would be too busy to answer.

The next day I despondently went back to the sites, only to find that Yongfook had created a new version of the Google Map program called Plug and Play. It immediately loaded and worked on activation.

It’s a really simple program to use. The instructions on Yongfook’s site are very clear, so I won’t repeat them in full here, but in a nutshell you create a new page which the Google Map will appear on and add a single line of code.

Plug and play creates a special admin panel in the Options menu. Through the panel you enter your google key and set a few features of the map like the display size, the starting coordinates for your map (I went with Sydney Town Hall) and what you want to be displayed in the google map speech bubbles. You also add the post slug for the new Google Map page, and hey presto, you are up and running.

There are some fun optional extras, like being able to add a thumbnail jpg picture to the speech bubble, and adding a button to the post which takes people to the Google Map.

The only thing Plug and Play doesn’t do is let you publish multiple maps (for example, I was thinking of creating specific maps for Melbourne and Canberra as well because I have some reviewers in these cities). I guess an alternative approach would be to have a map of Australia, and then people could zoom down to the city of their choice.

I also need to mention that Dylan, the Cyberhobo behind Geo Mash-up, came back to me within a matter of hours. He told me that the problem activating Geo Mash-up could have been because no geocode info was entered for any posts, or because the Geo did not load properly. He’s working on a newer version of Geo Mash-up so contact him via the Cyberhobo site if you have any trouble loading the program.

So, yay Google Maps and the brilliant Wordpress plugin developer community.

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