Created Virtual Earth Collections Block in Popfly

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image I like using the collections feature in Live Search Maps where I can keep collections of locations.  One of the activities that I wanted to do was share a collection on my blog as an embedded map. 

image

Unfortunately this isn’t one of the out-of-the-box features of Live Search Maps, so I decided to use Popfly to do it.  Since Popfly can use a Virtual Earth control and the Live Search maps can emit the collection as GeoRSS, I was able to create a simple mash-up that took the GeoRSS feed and put it into a map.  This wasn’t my favorite approach because I knew that the Virtual Earth control could natively use the Live Search Maps collections.  So here is where I created a new Virtual Earth block in Popfly that had some new functionality:

  1. It was based on the newest Virtual Earth API: 6.2
  2. It would read the Live Search Maps collection natively
  3. I wanted to add the option to show the map as a road map without the aerial imagery

I was able to do this by creating a new block based on the existing Virtual Earth block and adding the new method and properties for the new functionality.  You can now use the block (Virtual Earth 6_2) or the mash-up to create your own embeddable map with a collection:

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2008
    PingBack from http://apartmentcost.com/?p=6594

  • Anonymous
    December 18, 2008
    Is it not possible to show the pins with numbers and the collection key so that people can identify the locations without having to hover the mouse?

  • Anonymous
    December 22, 2008
    Graeme, It is possible, but it would take some time to code it. Michael

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2009
    The comment has been removed