"Bike Trip" Enhancements

Been playing around with the google maps API and made a few improvements to the little map at the bottom of the blog.

1. It now tells you how far along I am on the current leg of the journey (for example, right now, on the 1st leg, from Roswell to Mt. Carmel, I'm 97.08% along, with 12.5 miles to go, which means I'll be "arriving" in Mt. Carmel tomorrow!


2. The icons look a little nicer now. Instead of the standard google maps icons there are pushpins, and the bicycle icon looks nicer now. (If you aren't seeing the green bicycle icon, you probably need to hit refresh in the browser -- its probably still caching the old images). The green pushpin is my original starting point. Yellow pushpins indicate various stops along the way. The red pushpin is the "endpoint" of the trip, at least at this point in time. I plan to pick a new endpoint as I get close to whatever the current one is.


3. You can now click on the pushpins to get more information about the destination. I'll be updating them as I go along with information like what date I started for them, and when I arrived


4. There are two small links below the map, one is labeled "What is This?", which will take you to the first blog entry I wrote describing the idea behind the map. The second one is "Larger View", which will open up a much larger version of the map in a window


5. I registered a new domain, fatguysjourney.com, which will take you directly to the large map version. I have some ideas of doing more with that domain, but for now that's it.

I have some more ideas for enhancements, some on the backend to make the code easier to maintain, but one that I think will be cool is a play button, which will take you through an animated version of the map, iterating through each day of the "journey", showing the location on the map for that day for a few seconds. I think it will be kinda cool.

This is a really fun project. Its helping encourage me to get on that bike each morning, and its quite educational as well. I'm also learning a lot more Javascript, and all about the Google maps API!