Tour Para Bien Estar

April 11, 2006 3:46 PM

I had the great fortune of recently running into this fine fellow, who is currently in the middle of riding his bike from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska clear to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, all in the name of raising money for a youth home for at risk and abused teens in Alaska. Apparently, and unbeknownst to me, he has been wintering here in my home town of Missoula, MT for the past few months, but I only recently met him. We got to talking about his website, and he mentioned that he had been on the hunt for an easy way for him to mark his progress on a map for visitors and friends to follow. I, being the fairly technically minded guy that I am, would like to help with that.

My first instinct was integrating the Google Maps API directly into his Blogger account, but I'm not having any luck finding a way that would make it easy for him to add new waypoints as he progresses along. It seems GM is more adept at displaying two static points and mapping in between them. So, my question is, what $0 budget solution would YOU use to solve this particular quandry? And, as a side note, what other useful additions to his website would you recommend for this kind soul?

posted by rabble to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

What I would do is skip the path and just mark the daily points on the map. This is going to take him a good while (can he get more than 200 miles a day at most?) and the line of markers should give a good enough indication of his progress.

That being said, it's a very easy thing to add a point to a Google map as long as he knows his coordinates.

If you drop me an email (in my user page) I'll send you an example file that would easily handle this.

---

If that doesn't sound like a reasonable solution to you, take a look at Frappr.
posted by Kickstart70 at 4:05 PM on April 11, 2006

No idea about the mapping, but here are a couple of websites by some fellows that are on similar, and amazing adventures - they may give you some ideas: Tim Harvey and Colin Angus.
posted by meerkatty at 4:08 PM on April 11, 2006

Best answer: Wayfairing
posted by togdon at 4:17 PM on April 11, 2006

Best answer: Indy Junior
posted by gac at 4:30 PM on April 11, 2006

Ball of Dirt?
posted by kyleg at 7:16 PM on April 11, 2006