How to make a google map of literary locations and the calendar of events at each place?

October 18, 2008 8:07 PM

Beautiful hive mind, Please tell me the best way of making a map/calendar duo that I can embed into my blog.

I'd like to take Google Maps, and perhaps Google Calendar, and link the two together, much like they did here or here. Perhaps best described here. "Calmap."

Looking into this stuff makes my head hurt. Does anyone know of a simple way, for example, I could get a long and potentially very complicated Google Calendar or iCal into a Google Map, so that when you click on a place the events pop up and are listed? Perhaps the above sites have exactly what I'm looking for, but they got a bit too complicated for me. I'd like to embed the map into my school's wordpress.com blog.

We're willing to pay for an application, by the way, if it'll make things easier. Oh, and the calendar is supposed to be listing New York City's Literary Events, so there will be quite a lot of them. Any simple and quick ways of doing it?

Thanks!

PS, I'm not good with code. But I'm learning

posted by omnigut to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Sorry, but if the three methods I linked to are all explained as simply as possible, perhaps you could tell me which one you think is the simplest/quickest for my needs, and I'll try and learn it?
posted by omnigut at 8:08 PM on October 18, 2008

Can you use this generator, taken from your second link?
posted by niles at 8:37 PM on October 18, 2008 [1 favorite]

This may not be exactly what you want, but you *do*know that in Google Calendar you have an option of linking the event to a Google map, right?

I'm not sure if a single map can be gleaned from a handful of events though.
posted by Brittanie at 8:49 PM on October 18, 2008

Thanks, Niles, but it seems a little buggy. When I change the address of a place or add/drop events, it'll change in the left bar, but not on the map. Also, some events don't seem to be appearing at all.

Might be too difficult, I guess...

Can't believe google isn't on top of this already.
posted by omnigut at 11:19 PM on October 18, 2008

Are you married to the idea of Google maps/calendar? Will this need to be dynamically updated? If the answers to these are no, then consider this - BatchGeocode. You can use a CSV file (create in Excel, save as CSV - or export the CSV directly from Google calendar).
posted by desjardins at 7:42 PM on October 19, 2008