display order of descriptions in custom Google Maps

July 2, 2009 1:19 PM

In a custom Google map, the points you define are listed in forward chronological order and can't be re-ordered. Any way to change this (for all visitors, not just for your own viewing) to reverse chronological order?

By this I mean your description of the first point you add is listed first within the left sidebar; your description of the second point you add is listed just beneath that first description; etc.

I'm making a custom worldwide map of events that have been happening over the last 15 years (there are 120+ events so far) and will keep happening at an increasing rate.

Ideally I want my most recent entries to display first in the sidebar. Most importantly, I don't want my earliest entries in real chronological history to display first in the sidebar (because the earliest entries are the least interesting and therefore the last thing I want to feature prominently for people who view the map).

There's no really good approach here, if I know I don't want my chronologically-earliest entries displayed first. If I start now in reverse chronological order (first adding 2009 events to my map, then working backwards, ending with early-90s events), then in the future, adding the 2010-and-beyond events will just leave those sitting at the bottom of a long list.

Ideas? Workarounds? Tricks (that will work for all users across browsers and OSes) to force the sidebar display into reverse chronological order? I don't want to hide the sidebar altogether, since there are a couple notes in my description I want people to see.

posted by kalapierson to computers & internet (3 comments total)

In edit mode, you should be able to drag and drop your items in the left sidebar into any order. Click "Edit", and hover over the placemark icons (not the descriptive text) in the sidebar. You should get a four-way arrow, indicating they can be clicked, held, and dragged up or down.
posted by steef at 1:25 PM on July 2

Thanks, steef! That's a great solution for moving events one by one and I'll use it if there's no global trick for reversing the display order (which would still be ideal, if anybody has ideas).
posted by kalapierson at 1:35 PM on July 2

There's also a couple of map demos that can sync a Google Map to a Google Docs spreadsheet. With a spreadsheet, you could (theoretically) sort on a date column. I've used this one, but you have to sign up for an API key, and know enough basic HTML to embed a map in a webpage.

Good luck!
posted by steef at 1:58 PM on July 2