Archive for November, 2009

Added a basic Competitor Map to the Event profile page.

It geocodes the City and State from each Team’s profile to render a point on the map.

If you entered “Western” for City and “TX” for State so your Team profile shows your Team as hailing from “Western, TX” you might have avoided bruising egos, but your Team won’t show up because as it turns out…wait for it…there is no city named “Western” in Texas :-)

Lately, we’re doing a lot of work with maps. Along the way we’ve been looking at how to gather location data for Racers, Teams, Promoters, Events, etc.

Yahoo, Google and others offer what are called geocoding services that let you do all kinds of cool things given certain basic information…like a full address or even just a zip code.

Here’s a map showing all Checkpoint Tracker Promoters:

You’ve seen Google Maps before…so you might not be impressed…that’s fair.

What is significant about that map is that we generated it by using the free Google GeoCoder service to look up the Latitude and Longitude for each promoter using their address, city, state and zip code…which we then store in our database.

So what?

Ok, I hear ya.

The point is that we’ve now put in place the pieces to do ALL KINDS of cool stuff with maps and location data.

Show me all the Sprint races within 200 miles of my house…no problem.

Calculate the distance from the Start to Finish following all Checkpoints in order…no problem.

Now we’re getting somewhere…

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