Hi everyone,
This weekend I discovered a fascinating interactive globe generator called the Headmap Geosphere (http://sourceforge.net/projects/hm-geosphere/). Geosphere will display a globe on your website, which you can spin in any direction by clicking on the globe and dragging your mouse. You can set your globe to display markers all over the globe; for instance, I've set mine up to display places around the world for which I've published photo galleries or travel journals. If you click on a place marker, it'll open the Web page you associate with it -- so in my case, the links are to my galleries and travelogues. If there are several markers very close to each other, when you click on the group, the map will zoom in and give you a more detailed look, until you're close enough to select one of the markers individually. You can try it out here:
http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/globe.html
It's also on my blog's homepage at the moment:
http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/
The Geosphere is currently being developed by a guy in California named Dav Coleman. It's an open source project associated with the developer website, Sourceforge.net. Dav has used the geosphere in some interesting ways; for example, he's created a globe mapping out anti-war protests last year (http://www.danger-island.com/~dav/blogosphere/protests/). He wrote a perl script to extract the photo URLs and the cities from a website listing the protests. Perhaps some rainy day I may try to figure out a way to map the all the locations of listserv members, but it'd have to be pretty monsoonal. :-)
Setting up the map was very straightforward. I know a bit of HTML, and I'm not a programmer, but I still managed to figure it out without too much effort.
First, I had to upload two applet scripts to a folder on my website -- in this case, my blog's home directory (www.edwebproject.org/andy/blog/). These two scripts are normally available on the Geosphere page at SourceForge.net, but at the moment one of them appears to be missing, so if you want to get a copy of them, you can find them here:
http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/GlobeApplet.jar http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/sjg_xml.jar
Save a copy of each of these scripts, saving them with their original names, then place them together in a directory on your website. These scripts will be used to generate the globe.
Meanwhile, you'll have to create a text file that lists all of the places you want to plot on your globe. This text file is basically an XML document with some very simple coding in it; if you view the source of my geocoding file you'll see a long list of latitude and longitude points, each with a URL and a title associated with it. For example, here's my geocode text file:
http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/geocode.xml
To make your own geocode file, create a text file called geocode.xml and paste the following into it:
<headmap> <site latitude="x" longitude="y" href="LocationURL">LocationName</site> <site latitude="x" longitude="y" href="LocationURL">LocationName</site> <site latitude="x" longitude="y" href="LocationURL">LocationName</site> </headmap>
The two <headmap> tags are used to identify the start and end of the data list. In between are three <site> tags, each used to plot an individual marker on your globe. In order for each <site> tag to work, you'll have to fill out the latitude, longitude, Location URL and Location Name. For example, here's the tag I used to link to my wedding photo gallery:
<site latitude="39.25" longitude="-76.43" href="http://edwebproject.org/wedding /gallery.html">Our Wedding, Stevenson, MD (2003)</site>
You then repeat the <site> tag as many times as you want, depending on how many points you wish to place on your globe. Be sure to type a carriage return after each tag, so they're all listed on their own separate lines. So if you run a project with team members in 10 different cities around the world, you'd have to repeat the <site> tag 10 times, each time adding the appropriate latitude/longitude, URL for the person and their name. A handy tool for identifying a city's latitude and longitude can be found here (interestingly enough, it's for horoscopes, but it's got a sizeable city database): http://www.astro.com/atlas/
When your're done, your geocode.xml file should be saved in the same directory holding the two script files.
One last step: Cut and paste the source code from my page http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/globe.html and save it as an html file. You can tinker with the code to change the title, the colors of the globe, background, markers, etc. The only required change is to update the line that says "codebase." This should point to the directory on your website where you're storing the two script files. In my case, the line says this:
codebase="http://edwebproject.org/andy/blog/";
... because the two scripts are stored in that particular folder. But you'll have to update it; otherwise it'll display the markers on my globe, and how useful would that be? Once you've saved your HTML page, place it on your website and open it in your Web browser. If all goes well, you'll see your own private globe, with hyperlinked markers to your heart's content....
Andy Carvin acarvin at edc . org
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