State of The Beer Mapping Project Address
It’s been fairly close to a year now since I started working on this project, so it’s about time that we had a bit of a layout change and update.
The site and maps have come a long way since I first started. I think it all began with a simple map containing all the breweries and brewpubs in North Carolina. I remember slowly progressing through state by state, because I was doing all the data manipulation and harvesting by hand. A year later, I have managed to set up an somewhat functioning backend that allows me to have more time to work on the smaller things.
Over the past two weeks, I have updated the current maps to a much easier to manage pile of pages and files. I have added some features to the maps that I thought might be useful to beermappers that use the site.
I think one of the main issues with the maps in the past has been their navigation (or lack thereof). Someone will send a friend a link to the San Diego map and that friend will look at the map and enjoy that map, but the map was not configured for that person to be able to switch views or maps on the fly. This capability has now been implemented with the drop down menus. I think it was this stagnant navigation scheme that I had set up that was one of the main reasons I had so many duplicate location submissions.
Yesterday I set up a service tied to each location on the map that will allow a user to bookmark that location. It opens a popup window that neatly packages a link for the user that is centered on the latitude and longitude of the location that they were interested in. There are lots of features that can be tied in with this.
Currently I have a small number of social bookmarking sites linked from this pop-up that will allow a beermapper to save the location to their favorite online bookmark storage site (if you have a favorite social bookmarking site, feel free to comment about it so I can make sure it is supported). This feature is documented much more on it’s own page (the page has pictures too!). Read more about it on the Bookmarking Locations page.
The big map has resurfaced!
With the updates and changes to the map pages, we have increased speed in displaying location pins. Warning: this map is still fairly slow, so be warned that it may take a minute to open and it may move slowly. But it is fun to be able to see all the breweries and brewpubs across the United States!
Note: Clicking this picture opens a larger picture not the map. The link to the map is here.
It’s been a fun year! Hopefully there will be more updates and more changes in our future!
2 Responses to “State of The Beer Mapping Project Address”
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Thanks for all the hard work!
I like the new links to beeradvocate and other sites for extra information.
I did something really dumb with the bookmarking code yesterday before I left the house (I visited a new brewpub and a new brewery yesterday!).
I broke the bookmarking code and didn’t notice. But after some deliberation and head scratching this morning I have repaired it. It’s amazing what one misplaced character in a whole page of code can do!