options for mapping celebrities on websites

March 28, 2013 3:36 PM

I am interested in building a website that will track public appearances for multiple celebs (think stars of a reality show) and I'm not sure what frameworks I could use.

The stars of this reality show often make local appearances, but there is no easy way to track them. Some post appearances to twitter, some to facebook, some to their websites, some don't post at all. The information I'm interested tracking is Celeb name, country/state/city (lat/long?), date/time, location (e.g. Memorial Auditorium), and a link for more info that would like to the relevant events page.

I'd like to find a framework that will allow me to build a map that can be filtered in different ways (let's say by name, week, or city). For now, I'll be digging up this information manually myself, but bonus points if I can give the celebs their own access at a later date to update their own appearances.

I'm zero percent familiar with web APIs, but I'm fairly computer adept and can figure it out if I knew which one would work the best for my application.

posted by zug to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Dead simple solution would be a public Google Calendar or Google Fusion Table, depending on whether you want to emphasize the calendar view or the database/geographic view (though they both have maps). Then use any CMS that allows Google iframes.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 4:22 PM on March 28, 2013

MIT's SIMILE 3.0 javascript framework does maps. If you look at the non-map demos you can see that easy filtering and sorting is its specialty; hopefully all of those features can be applied with a map display of the data too.
posted by XMLicious at 2:55 AM on March 29, 2013 [1 favorite]