• Radiohead’s Creep, murdered by MS Songsmith.. http://snipr.com/bx5si #
• Knackered, think I may have to catch up on the goings on at Sterling Cooper from my bed. #
• @jimmoran only just caught your message. At geekup now. #
• another good Geekup. but SO sleepy now. #

Bit of a niche post this one, but thought i’d share in case it saves someone else some time. I’ve been noodling around with Google Maps over the past few days on a job which started simple and then rapidly got more complex (don’t they all!)

It also pointed up some of the limitations within the My Maps version of the product. I was building a map of the UK, showing around 300 of my clients locations. I started out with a bit of a ropey spreadsheet, which after some cleanup I fed through the very useful batchgeocode.com which happily takes delimited text and chews through it geocoding the info (even if all you have is a postcode) and creating lat/long co-ordinates.

Once that’s done you can save it as a KML file and import it into Google MyMaps. That’s where the !=fun begins. For some reason MyMaps pages the results when you hit 200 markers, so from then on the map will only show one page worth of markers at a time. Not so bad on the site, but a bit sucky if you intend to embed the map (where the paging isn’t shown).

At this point I realised we’d need to wheel out the Maps API to save the day and here my technical knowledge falters a little. Particularly as not only did we need to show the 300 pins from the KML file…but each location was also allocated to one of 36 areas and each area was in one of 5 divisions.

I knew i’d be wanting something like numbered pins showing the areas and perhaps of different colours to denote the divisions. This way you get clusters of colour showing the divisions and the numbers are also clustered (more or less) into areas.

But doing all that with the API was a bit beyond my limited knowledge so I handed it over to my talented team of techies who had it worked out in very short order.

Which just left me needing to locate a set of graphics for the markers, I know there are fancy pants ways of generating them programmatically but for reasons we won’t go into I needed a folder full of PNG files.

Actually finding something to fit the bill was tricky, eventually after some hunting I hit on this post at benjaminkeen.com which had a set of markers (and a PSD file, hurrah!) from A-Z in 10 different colours.

So, for those of you searching for numbered markers instead, I present below, my version. A PSD with the numbers 1-36 (I only needed that many and I don’t love you enough to go up to 99) and the 10 colours.

Google Map Markers 1-36 (markers.psd) 616Kb 

May it save you a little time and effort if it can.

• baking lemon muffins… http://snipr.com/bilw9 #
• Reading about Thales Cress…the weed that also detects land mines!? http://snipr.com/bixuc #
• #uksnow BD4 7/10 Snowing again…must be sunday.. #
• @eyetracking am intrigued by both your last two tweets, whats the story? #
• Trains running fine after snow and rain. Burst water main at Potters bar however. Arses. #
• Wishing every desk at work had a drinks tray and ice bucket like at Sterling Cooper. #
• Loving http://www.batchgeocode.com #
• Looking forward to series 2 of Damages…starts Sunday BBC1, halfway thru rewatching series 1 on DVD #
• Doesn’t think he’ll be making it to the Twestival Pitch tomorrow to prepare for. #
• @sovietuk unless prefixed with “The antithesis of…” #
• @Thehodge Still at work here, whats the ustream URL in reply to Thehodge #
• @Clemsmum hallelujah you’re preaching to the choir here! Same problem myself. #
• @thehodge having braindead moment, sure i’ve seen on the geekup list an online service to share creative work with clients? any ideas? ta! #
• Received one valentines missive…from TV Licensing. :-/ #