We have been working with a small French company called Cartographe on interactive maps for our trip.

The idea is to have a set of interactive maps that cover the route of our trip this summer. When we post a journal entry from the road, we will optionally add the coordinates of the location where the post is made. This will then add an interactive link to the map for that leg of the trip. Fabrice Fontaine has been extremely helpful. He has worked up a prototype for us. Fabrice is in the process of transferring his domain, otherwise I would add a link to Cartographe.

I now need to spend some time figuring out how to best integrate this with our site and with pMachine. The structure of the site could end up changing quite a bit. Maps are central to a journey and they probably should be central to a site about our journeys.

Also the map coordinates are driven from an XML file. This means that in order to have a web based way of updating the map, I need to create some additional UI to enter the map coordinates and link to a post. Not difficult but it means that a user would need to go to two separate pages to create a post. One for the post itself and another for the map link. Integrating with pMachine directly would be a good idea. Perhaps I could use the custom fields and work with Fabrice on a different way to access the coordinates either using the existing pMachine tags or even MySQL directly.

Stay tuned.