I recently found an old map of the Heathrow area on Wikipedia. It shows the area as it was in the 1930′s, when the aiport was known as the Great West Aerodrome. You can drag the slider to fade in the current map, which I nabbed from Open Street map. Producing that was the very limit of my CSS/JS knowledge, so sadly you can’t pan around it like you can with normal online maps!
You can see the maps here.
Phil Gyford recently had a lovely idea of collating all the things geo tagged each day into a map for that day. It didnt take me long before I thought I’d have a go at doing this myself, it also gave me another reason to finally sit down and arrange some sort of backup of my Tweets and my FourSquare checkins.
This is all written in PHP, because well, that is what I know best. I write code very rarely, probably no more than once every year or two so I wasn’t up for learning a new language at the same time. The underpinnings of it all are a couple of scripts which get run every day and pull all of my tweets and checkins and store them locally. So most of what drives this map is actually just reading local files, rather than making API calls to the various services.
The first map below is from 2010-08-31 which is when I was down on the Isle of Wight.
Improvements I’d like to make
I’d like to be able to add these enhancements soonish, free time permitting. And
