That's One Small Step for the Web...

Every now and then I have an idea that I think is pretty good, technology-wise. I'm not silly enough to think these ideas will make me rich. After all, as a good friend says, it's always about the execution.

More importantly, I've found in the previous few years that if I have a good idea, somebody smarter than me has it, too and if I'm patient, the technology will appear sooner or later. One of those moments was yesterday.

A few months ago, Google announced their new "My Maps" feature which makes it easy to draw and label your own maps, without the Google API key. If you're not a geek, working with the API key is a bit of a chore. I know this because I'm not a geek.

Anywho, the one problem with the new My Maps feature was that your resulting map still couldn't be put on another web page (like this blog for instance) without the API key. So you can have a cool map, but it basically stood by itself, unless you're a web geek.

Yesterday, Google made it easy to embed maps (or My Maps) into any page. Notice the right sidebar where I added the map of races in my area. Pretty cool, huh? Incidentally, now that Google made this tweak, I plan to add a lot more races to... My Map.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Happy D-Blog Day, Uh, I Guess...

So according to diabetics blog-wide, today is D-Blog Day, the day when those of us affected by diabetes are supposed to blog about it. Or draw awareness to diabetes... Or something like that. I'm really a bad poster child for the disease. Not because I'm not in great control (actually, I am), but because I've just never been bothered by the disease so much. Red sums it up well in Shawshank Redemption: "Get busy living, or get busy dying." So if living means three blood sugar tests a day, so be it. If living means being hooked up to an insulin pump, go to it. That being said, I feel for anyone with diabetic kids... I'm a tough guy about the disease. I wouldn't be if my kids had it. If either of my kids had diabetes, I'd be screaming about the politicians who are spending money on wars instead of research, and I'd be yelling about the schools that make it difficult to be a diabetic in the classroom. But my kids don't have diabetes, so instead I
Read more

The gun in my basement.

Image
In my basement, I have a safe. And in that safe, under expired passports and birth certificates, there's a gun. It's unloaded. Hasn't been loaded in probably twenty years, and yet every time I take it out, I check to make sure. If you're a gun nerd, it's a 9 shot .22 revolver. On this website , it says that "it is true that many people have been killed by a .22 LR in the course of history," but the writer concludes that this weapon is a bad choice for self defense. I didn't buy it for self defense. I didn't even buy it. It was my father's and after he died, my mother gave it me, along with an Elgin watch he'd worn for years. The watch was weathered and worn and I took it to be restored. The jeweler refused, saying it was worthless. Two decades later, the watch is still in my jewelry box. There's no need for it to be locked up. I have no idea if this gun is in my possession legally. No idea if my father had a permit for it, or w
Read more

Sh*t Diabetics Say

Image
I love the funny video series making its way around the Net. It started with Shit Girls Say, and has spawned many funny sequels. But none for diabetics, until now! If you like the camera work, that's my 15 year old daughter at the helm. My son was home sick from school and my daughter felt she needed a "mental health day," too. I said, "Sure... I can use your help with something, anyway!"
Read more