I started thinking and researching for phase 2 of the internship tonight. Plotting all of the objects that a student selects as their “My Favorites” on a map. There seems to be a number of options available, and the most usable seems to be a combination of yahoo maps and flash.
A quick search of the Internets pulled up this page from one of the makers of PHP. Rasmus’ Toys Page has a great writeup on how to mash yahoo maps, flash and GeoCodes into a neato map. What I like best about this (besides the flashy eye-candy – pun intended) is the ability this set up has to automatically grab the longitude and latitude from as little as the city and state. I’m not sure how well it will work for places outside of the US, but theoretically all of the objects in the database will have their GeoCodes as part of their metadata.
Oh, and since I haven’t done a snapshot of the progress on the Flash movie, here’s the latest. Each of the targets are clickable, so you can have a better chance to see the text in the bubble. I should have put a version from between this and the one before… but I was working feverishly to make it look good. I’ve spent way too much time trying to make it look good. I desperately need some design skills.
