Night
in
Tucson

Flower
of the
Month

Phase
of the
Moon

workshop

• google maps 101

The goal of this workshop is to learn to create a basic Google map with flags for a few of my favorite Tucson locations. In progress. Here's what I've got so far. Click a flag to get information about the location.

Getting Ready: The first bit of business is setting up a free account with Google. If you have GMail, you've already got one. Everything else you'll need can be found on the Google's Maps API site. You'll need an API key for each domain that will include mapping. The application process is automated and instantaneous.

Follow the Recipe: Google's documentation is fairly good, though previous experience with JavaScript is required to make sense of it. To get started, I went through the Developer's Guide and just started following along. First hitch came at setting the initial zoom level, since I didn't want to use their example of 13. It seems that in order to do anything beyond that which is demonstrated in the Guide, it is necessary to dig into the API Reference. The Reference doesn't offer code examples, so experimentation is required.