MapQuest Devblog

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

In theory, the project to place RSS news feeds on a map could be very easy. GeoRSS is standard for encoding geographic locations in RSS feeds. RSS feeds that have this encoding are the perfect data source for this project. But, in practice, the feeds I've been looking at do not have GeoRSS information. So, I'm going to start by seeing what I can get done without GeoRSS.

The source of news that I'm working with is the AOL national news RSS feed. The description element of each feed starts with a location. I extracted the location, geocoded each location with the MapQuest (MQ) geocoding service, and then placed point of interest (POI) markers on the map.

In my last post, I laid out my design for MapNews. In this post, I present the working application and code I've written based on the MQ client Javascript tool kit. The following screen shot of MapNews shows POI markers for cities that have news stories in an example feed. I've clicked on the POI marker for Salt Lake City to expose links to news stories in the information window.

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." - Lewis Carroll

Like many developers I often start a project by jumping in and writing code. For this project I'm going try something a little different and create a road map for my mapping project.

My project is named MapNews. In my prior post, I covered the project concept: present a map with markers/information windows which show news headlines by location.

Doing the design up front is a bit of a jump off of a cliff for me. I've had only a light reading of the MapQuest Platform documentation and am going to proceed to layout the design. This should be interesting; as the project unfolds, I'll be able to look back and see my misconceptions exposed.