Alex Little

Spent the morning having a play around with Google maps as we’re looking to embed maps into the MSG – I’ve got a simple page set up (here) to demo listing contacts – you can then click on the contact to show their location on the map.

However, what we’d really like would be to have would be all contacts shown on the same map (my current example just show one contact at a time). I had a go at doing this with the Google maps API, but all UK addresses seemed to draw a blank – then I found out about the issue of having the lat/long coordinates for UK addresses (some copyright thing! – see all the messages in this forum about it). So it seems (from my current understanding after my brief delve into this stuff this morning) that I’d need to get hold of a geocode database to use with Google maps. Apparently the OU might already have a geocode db I can use – so I’ll need to see if I can track this down and get permission to make use of it.

There are plenty of other options for us I guess including…

• use another mapping service which does provide UK geocodes
• use IP lookup – I know this wouldn’t be too accurate for lots of people – but could make a best guess & give users the option to update if they want
• integrate in a postcode/geocode db – there are apparently free ones, that only have the first part of the postcode – but that’s actually all we want for this application!

Anyway, I shall keep going and see if I can get any further