Stap isi

Local government, the internet & community engagement online

Another string & sticky tape home craft session. See the result. The nice bit is that people can add themselves to the map. Here are the steps taken:

A Google Docs spreadsheet form collects Twitter name, suburb (optional), city/town and country from those attending the conference
When submitted, the form populates a Google spreadsheet
The spreadsheet uses functions to generate latitude, longitude, Twitter URL, Twitter profile image URL and a HTML description for each tweep
The sheet is set to ‘publish to the web’ as a text file – CSV format – with option ticked to ‘automatically republish when changes are made’
A Yahoo! Pipe transforms this data into a GeoRSS feed
The feed gets chucked into Google Maps and you can see which tweeps will be at the conference (and where they’re from)

… are generated courtesy of the SPIURL web service. It provides a static link to Twitter profile images.

Locations are being dynamically geocoded via Google and returned to the spreadsheet using the ImportData function (refer to Geocoding by Google Spreadsheets). But you’re restricted to 50 of these functions per sheet – so there’s a hard limit on the number of tweeps that can be added.
More than one tweep may enter “Sydney, Australia” as a location – resulting in multiple markers on the same point, with only one visible and clickable. The sidebar gives access to all tweeps but that’s a consolation prize at best. A random number could probably be added to the tail of each coordinate to push markers slightly apart? Update: truncated the lat/long and added a random number – kinda works but a cluster would be better.
There is no error checking. “WE Believe in Community”!

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