Marla Parker's Weblog

fun with placemarks
I am really happy that the JUGs Community on java.net has made such great progress recently in creating their own worldwide JUGS Map using a kml file.

I followed their Check it out! link and quickly got sucked in to the world of kml and created this map:

View Larger Map

It works better if you view the larger map,and some of the placemarks are practically on top of each other if you are zoomed out to the whole world. Click on the placemark to see the info and picture - be sure to look at the ones in Norway. I created this quickly only because I had already spent an inordinate amount of time creating a more detailed one for my family pointing at more places and with links to the complete photo albums. This stuff is so easy my kids could do it (HINT HINT!!).

Update: What weirdness is this? I came back to this blog and found that the placemarks defined in this file were not showing. In fact, they don't show if I load the file manually in the location box on maps.google.com, either. So I copied the file from blogs.sun.com to my home server, and voila, it works again. The images referenced in the placemarks are still in blogs.sun.com/marla/resource, and they show fine. But if you load up http://blogs.sun.com/marla/resource/trips3a.kml in maps.google.com, it says "File not found at http://blogs.com/marla/reso...." I don't know where it is getting blogs.com from.

If anyone has a clue, I'd love to be enlightened. While you are at it, feel free to load the kml file into Google Earth and see if you can figure out why the double picture at Otter Point (in Maine) only shows one picture in Earth, though it reliably shows both in Maps.