After creating a basic map for our round-the-world itinerary and then adding photos when placemarkers are clicked, today we're going to add some handy labels to the map to show rough dates for when we'll be arriving in a particular location. This actually proved trickier than expected: there's an old library called MapLabel that works well with the Google Maps API, but it doesn't load asynchronously in a straightforward way. So I had to jump through some hoops to load it only when the main Google Maps API is available, avoiding some irritating load errors. I used some code from…

In the last post we looked at a basic implementation of a round-the-world itinerary in Google Maps. In today's post we're going to add the ability to see the first photo associated with a location when you click on it. The Google Maps API makes it fairly easy to get the photos associated with a particular place, but it helps to identify that place uniquely: while you can search for a place based on its name, it's more efficient and reliable to get its unique "place ID" and use that instead. I used this handy PlaceD Finder tool to get…

Over the next few posts I'm going to talk about the process I went through to integrate the itinerary for our imminent round-the-world trip into the awesome web-site my wife has set up. The initial approach I took was to use Google My Maps: this is a really cool tool for creating a custom map without any coding needed (yes, I know – that doesn't sound like much fun :-). For instance, you can set up your placemarks and link them with a route, and when individual places are clicked it shows a nice sliding info panel. I started out…