I tried once a year or so back and was unsuccessful. The build process just never worked for me and I couldn’t find a binary build that fit my OS + Python version + Java version combination.

Check out PyLucene:

$ svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/pylucene/trunk pylucene

Build JCC. I install Python packages in my home directory and if you do so too you can omit sudo before the last command, otherwise leave it in:

$ cd pylucene/jcc
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

Now we need to edit PyLucene’s Makefile to be configured for OSX and Python 2.5. If you use a different setup than the one that ships with OSX 10.5, you’ll have to adjust these parameters to match your setup.

Edit the Makefile:

$ cd ..
$ nano Makefile

Uncomment the 5 lines Below the comment # Mac OS X (Python 2.5, Java 1.5). If you have installed a different version of Python such as 2.6, there should be a combination that works for you. Here’s what I uncommented:

# Mac OS X  (Python 2.5, Java 1.5)
PREFIX_PYTHON=/usr
ANT=ant
PYTHON=$(PREFIX_PYTHON)/bin/python
JCC=$(PYTHON) -m jcc --shared
NUM_FILES=2

Save the file, exit your editor, and build PyLucene:

$ make

If it doesn’t build properly check the settings in your Makefile.

After a successful build, install it (again you can omit sudo if you install Python packages locally and not system-wide):

$ sudo make install

Now verify that it’s been installed:

$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Nov 11 2008, 17:46:48)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import lucene
>>>

If it imports without a problem you should have a working PyLucene library. Rejoice.

Install build toolchain:

$ sudo aptitude install build-essential checkinstall

Install Postgres:

$ sudo aptitude install postgresql postgresql-client \
postgresql-client-common postgresql-contrib \
postgresql-server-dev-8.3

Get Sphinx source:

$ wget http://www.sphinxsearch.com/downloads/sphinx-0.9.8.1.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf sphinx-0.9.8.1.tar.gz
$ cd sphinx-0.9.8.1

Configure and make:

$ ./configure --without-mysql --with-pgsql \
--with-pgsql-includes=/usr/include/postgresql/ \
--with-pgsql-lib=/usr/lib/postgresql/8.3/lib/
$ make

Run checkinstall:

$ mkdir /usr/local/var
$ sudo checkinstall

Sphinx is now installed in /usr/local. Check out /usr/local/etc/ for configuration info.

Create something to index:

$ createdb -U postgres test
$ psql -U postgres test
test=# create table test (id integer primary key not null, text text);
test=# insert into test (text) values ('Hello, World!');
test=# insert into test (text) values ('This is a test.');
test=# insert into test (text) values ('I have another thing to test.');
test=# -- A user with a password is required.
test=# create user foo with password 'bar';
test=# alter table test owner to foo;
test=# \q

Configure sphinx (replace nano with your editor of choice):

$ cd /usr/local/etc
$ sudo cp sphinx-min.conf.dist sphinx.conf
$ sudo nano sphinx.conf

These values worked for me. I left configuration for indexer and searchd unchanged:

source src1
{
  type = pgsql
  sql_host = localhost
  sql_user = foo
  sql_pass = bar
  sql_db = test
  sql_port = 5432
  sql_query = select id, text from test
  sql_query_info = SELECT * from test WHERE id=$id
}

index test1
{
  source = src1
  path = /var/data/test1
  docinfo = extern
  charset_type = utf-8
}

Reindex:

$ sudo mkdir /var/data
$ sudo indexer --all

Run searchd:

$ sudo searchd

Play:

$ search world

Sphinx 0.9.8.1-release (r1533)
Copyright (c) 2001-2008, Andrew Aksyonoff

using config file '/usr/local/etc/sphinx.conf'...
index 'test1': query 'world ': returned 1 matches of 1 total in 0.000 sec

displaying matches:
1. document=1, weight=1

words:
1. 'world': 1 documents, 1 hits

Use Python:

cd sphinx-0.9.8.1/api
python
>>> import sphinxapi, pprint
>>> c = sphinxapi.SphinxClient()
>>> q = c.Query('world')
>>> pprint.pprint(q)
{'attrs': [],
 'error': '',
 'fields': ['text'],
 'matches': [{'attrs': {}, 'id': 1, 'weight': 1}],
 'status': 0,
 'time': '0.000',
 'total': 1,
 'total_found': 1,
 'warning': '',
 'words': [{'docs': 1, 'hits': 1, 'word': 'world'}]}

If you add new data and want to reindex, make sure you use the –rotate flag:

sudo indexer --rotate --all

This is an extremely quick and dirty installation designed to give me a sandbox
to play with. For production use you would want to run as a non-privileged user
and would probably want to have an /etc/init.d script for searchd or run it
behind supervised. If you’re looking to experiment with Sphinx and MySQL,
there should be plenty of documentation out there to get you started.

Our election app is definitely a success story for both the benefits of structured data and incremental development. Each time the app gets a little more sophisticated and a little smarter. What once wasn’t used until the night of the election has become a key part of our election coverage both before and after the event. For example, this year we had an overarching election section and also sections for indivudual races, like this section for the Douglas County Commission 2nd district Democratic primary. These sections tie together our coverage of the individual races: Stories, photos and videos about the race, our candidate profiles, any chats we’ve had with the candidates, campaign finance documents, and candidate selectors, an awesome app that has been around longer than I have that lets users see which candidates they most agree with. On election night they’re smart enough to display results as they come in.

This time around, the newsroom also used our tools to swap out which races were displayed on the homepage throughout the night. We lead the night with results from Leavenworth County, since they were the first to report. The newsroom spent the rest of the nice swapping in one or more race on the homepage as they saw fit. This was a huge improvement over past elections where we chose ahead of time which races would be featured on the homepage. It was great to see the newsroom exercise editorial control throughout the night without having to involve editing templates.

On the television side, 6 News Lawrence took advantage of some new hardware and software to display election results prominently throughout the night. I kept catching screenshots during commercial breaks, but the name of the race appeared on the left hand side of the screen with results paging through on the bottom of the screen. The new hardware and software allowed them to use more screen real estate to provide better information to our viewers. In years past we’ve had to jump through some hoops to get election results on the air, but this time was much easier. We created a custom XML feed of election data that their new hardware/software ingested continuously and pulled results from. As soon as results were in our database they were on the air.

The way that election results make their way in to our database has also changed for the better over the past few years. We have developed a great relationship with the Douglas County Clerk, Jamie Shew and his awesome staff. For several elections now they have provided us with timely access to detailed election results that allow us to provide precinct-by-precinct results. It’s also great to be able to compare local results with statewide results in state races. We get the data in a structured and well-documented fixed-width format and import it using a custom parser we wrote several elections ago.

State results flow in via a short script that uses BeautifulSoup to parse and import data from the Kansas Secretary of State site. That script ran every few minutes throughout the night and was updating results well after I went to bed. In fact it’s running right now while we wait for the last few precincts in Hodgeman County to come in. This time around we did enter results from a few races in Leavenworth and Jefferson counties by hand, but we’ll look to automate that in November.

As always, election night coverage was a team effort. I’m honored to have played my part as programmer and import guru. As always, it was great to watch Christian Metts take the data and make it both beautiful and meaningful in such a short amount of time. Many thanks go out to the fine folks at Douglas County and all of the reporters, editors, and technical folk that made our coverage last night possible.

I think the panel will be pretty fantastic but I can’t help be just as terrified as my fellow panelists. I love that we’ll have both Journalist-programmers and Programmer-journalists on the panel, and I love that Django is so often the glue that brings the two together.

DjangoCon is going to be awesome.

Last weekend, our first child, Natalie Anne Croydon was born. I’ve been trying to keep up with Flickr photos and updated my twitter feed a lot during the labor and delivery process (what a geek!). Thanks to everyone for their kind words and congratulations.

For more pictures, check my Flickr archive starting on May 24 or my photos tagged “Natalie”.

The decision to port the Basic Stamp autopilot to Arduino turned out to be an unexpected opportunity to make something really cool. I’ve taken Jordi’s open source RC multiplexer/failsafe board, and mashed it up with an Arduino clone to create “ArduPilot”, perhaps the cheapest autopilot in the world. ($110! That’s one-third the price of Paparazzi)

As with their other projects, the UAV schematics, board design, and Arduino control software will be released before they’re done. It’s quite awesome to realize just how cheap the Arduino-based autopilot is:

That’s a $110 autopilot, thanks to the open source hardware. By comparison, the Basic Stamp version of this, with processor, development board and failsafe board, would run you $300, and it’s not as powerful

I’ve been quite impressed by how quickly the Arduino autopilot has gotten off the ground (pun only slightly intended). The decision to port the existing Basic Stamp code to Arduino was made just over a week ago. While I haven’t seen the control code, it looks like the team are well on their way.

I love it when geek topics collide, and this is about as good as it gets. I’ll be keeping a close eye on the ArduPilot, and I can’t wait to see it in the skies.

Espoo, Finland - Nokia today unveiled a trio of mobile devices that balance stunning and sophisticated looks with the latest in mobile functionality. All three devices, the Nokia 6600 fold, the Nokia 6600 slide and the Nokia 3600 slide present a smooth, minimalist design and an appealing array of easy-to-use features. The devices range in price from 175 EUR to 275 EUR before taxes and subsidies and are expected to start shipping during the third quarter of 2008.

I know that Nokia have a finite set of product names when we’re talking about 4 digit numbers. Aside from the Nseries and Eseries and a handful of other products, Nokia are pretty keen on assigning 4 digit numbers as product names. While often confusing, at least it avoids product names like RAZR or ENv. I don’t quite get the naming of the 6600 fold and the 6600 slide though. Either someone in Espoo has the attention span of a goldfish or they expect that S60 consumers do.

Us S60 owners are a pretty loyal and knowledgeable bunch. We do our research and know our history. I may be wrong, but I’d venture that a good number of S60 users could name a dozen or more S60 models from the 7650 to the N-Gage to the N95. Surely a good chunk of us would rattle off the 6600 in the process. We might also remember the 3600 as the awkward American cousin of the 3650.

You know, that business phone from 2003 that brought significant hardware and software upgrades to the table compared to the 7650 and the 3650. I sure remember it as if it were yesterday.

Every once in awhile someone raises a stink about Nokia reusing a product number. Usually it’s a product number from the 80’s or 90’s and the word “Classic” is attached to the new phone. I’m OK with that. I just think that it’s a little early to be reusing a product code from 2003 in a market segment of geeks and power users.

While I didn’t get a chance to hang out too long during the sprints, I did pull together some code for a concept I’ve wanted to do for a long time: a limpet webcam that I can stick on something and watch it ride around the city. Specifically I thought it would be cool to attach one to a city bus and upload pictures while tracing its movements.

So here’s my quick 19 line prototype that simply takes a picture using the camera API and uploads the saved photo using ftplib copied over from the Python 2.2.2 standard library. It’s called webcam.py. I haven’t run it since PyCon, so the most recent photo is from the PyS60 intro session.

Working with PyS60 again was absolutely refreshing. I write Python code (using Django) at work but writing code for a mobile device again got the creative juices flowing. I’m trying to do more with less in my spare time, but I definitely need to make more time for PyS60 in my life.

We’re covering the Caucus results at LJWorld.com and on Twitter.

Turnout is extremely heavy. So much so that they had to split one of the caucus sites in two because the venue was full.

Later…

How did we do it?

We gained access to the media results page from the Kansas Democratic Party on Friday afternoon. On Sunday night I started writing a scraper/importer using BeautifulSoup and rouging out the Django models to represent the caucus data. I spent Monday refining the models, helper functions, and front-end hooks that our designers would need to visualize the data. Monday night and in to Tuesday morning was spent finishing off the importer script, exploring Google Charts, and making sure that Ben and Christian had everything they needed.

After a few hours of sleep, most of the morning was spent testing everything out on our staging server, fixing bugs, and improving performance. By early afternon Ben was wrapping up KTKA and Christian was still tweaking his design in Photoshop. Somewhere between 1 and 2 p.m. he started coding it up and pretty soon we had our results page running on test data on the staging server.

While the designers were finishing up I turned my focus to the planned Twitter feed. Thanks to some handy wrappers from James, I wrote a quick script that generated a short message based on the caucus results we had, compared it to the last version of the message, and sent a post to Twitter if the message had changed.

Once results started coming in, we activated our coverage. After fixing one quick bug, I’ve been spending most of the evening watching importers feed data in to our databases and watching the twitter script send out updates. Because we’ve been scraping the Kansas Democratic Party media results all night and showing them immediately, we’ve been picking up caucuses seconds after they’ve been reported and have been ahead of everything else I’ve looked at.

Because we just recently finished moving our various Kansas Weekly papers to Ellington and a unified set of templates, it was quite trivial to include detailed election results on the websites for The Lansing Current, Baldwin City Signal, Basehor Sentinel, The Chieftain, The De Soto Explorer, The Eudora News, Shawnee Dispatch, and The Tonganoxie Mirror

While there are definitely things we could have done better as a news organization (there always are), I’m quite pleased at what we’ve done tonight. Our servers hummed along quite nicely all night, we got information to our audience as quickly as possible, and generally things went quite smoothly. Many thanks to everyone involved.

So I’ll mention it again: We’re hiring! We’re growing and we have several positions open at both the junior and senior level. We’d love to talk to you if you’ve been working with Django since back in the day when everything was a tuple. We’d love to talk to you if you’re smart and talented but don’t have a lot of (or any) Django experience.

Definitely check out the listing at djangogigs for more, or feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to know more.

Using these lightweight webapps has definitely increased productivity on several fronts. While as much as we would love every FOIA request and data source to come in a digital format, we constantly see data projects start with a big old stack of paper. Google spreadsheets has allowed us to parallelize and coordinate data entry in a way that just wasn’t possible before. We can create multiple spreadsheets and have multiple web producers enter data in their copious spare time. I did some initial late night data entry for the KU flight project (Jacob and Christian rocked the data visualization house on that one), but we were able to take advantage of web producers to enter the vast majority of the data.

Sometimes the data entry is manageable enough (or the timeline is tight enough) that the reporter or programer can handle it on their own. In this case, it allows us to quickly turn quick spreadsheet-style data entry in to CSV, our data lingua franca for data exchange. Once we have the data in CSV form we can visualize it with Swivel or play with it in ManyEyes. If all we’re looking for is a tabular listing of the data, we’ve written some tools that make that easy and look good too. On larger projects, CSV is often the first step to importing the data and mapping it to Django objects for further visualization.

Awesome webapps that increase productivity aren’t limited to things that resemble spreadsheets from a distance. A few weeks back we had a reporter use Google’s awesome MyMaps interface to create a map of places to enjoy and avoid while traveling from Lawrence, KS to Miami, FL for the orange bowl. We pasted the KML link in to our Ellington map admin and instantly had an interactive map on our site. A little custom template work completed the project quite quickly.

It all boils down to apps that facilitate collaboration, increase productivity, and foster data flow. Sometimes the best app for the job sits on the desktop (or laptop). Increasingly, I’ve found that those apps live online—accessable anywhere, anytime.

At work we don’t do what we do for awards. We do it to serve our readers, tell a story, get information out there, and do it as best we can. At the same time even being nominated as finalists is quite an honor, and evokes warm fuzzy feelings in this programmer.

Here are the various World Company projects and sites that were nominated (in the less than 75,000 circulation category):

• Most Innovative Multimedia Storytelling: 24 Hours in Lawrence (LJWorld.com)
• Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site: Lawrence.com
• Best Design and Site Architecture: LJWorld.com
• Best Overall News Site: LJWorld.com

Not too shabby for a little media company in Kansas. I’m particularly excited about the LJWorld.com nominations since it hasn’t been too long since we re-designed and re-launched the site with a lot of new functionality. Scanning the finalists I also see a couple of other sites running Ellington as well as several special projects by those sites.

As someone who writes software for news organizations for a living I’m definitely going to take some time this morning to take a look at the other finalists. I’m particularly excited to check out projects from names that I’m not familiar with.

Web Browser for S60 is easily the most powerful app that ships with new S60 devices. It renders real websites well and quickly using my favorite rendering engine. It packs more features, options, and actions on one screen than any other app that I can think of.

It comes at a price though. Aside from the two softkeys there aren’t any keys on the device marked specifically for browser actions once you’re in the app. Even better, I usually use the browser in full screen mode to maximize screen real estate, so those two softkeys are now gone.

It’s still an amazing app, I just distinctly recall the constant remembering and forgetting and looking up of shortcut keys as a big pain point in my enjoyment of the S60 browser. It’s something that I’d love to see addressed, but I’m not sure of an easy way to do so without resorting to touch interfaces or keys (physical or virtual) that change labels given different contexts.

Mobile browser shortcuts are a lot easier on a device like the N800 or N810 that can dedicate keys to it full time. Or you can go the no-keys approach that seems to be working well for the iPhone.

I know that those smart Finns will figure it out.

Andrew Turner had turned me on to OpenStreetMap over beers at Free State and at GIS Day @ KU even though I’ve been reading about it for some time now. So far it seems like an amazing community and I’ve been enjoying digging in to the API and XML format and various open source tools like osmarender, JSOM, and OpenLayers.

After getting psyched up at GIS Day I’ve been playing with some other geo tools, but more on that later.

My wife and I just bought a house and I’ve realized that there isn’t any room in the budget for major gadget purposes, so I’ve been trying not to get too excited about things coming down the road. It’s not suprising that I’ve been following the recently announced Nokia N810 Internet Tablet in a much more detached manner than usual.

That is until I saw Ari Jaaksi holding a prototype in his hand. Holy crap that thing is significantly smaller than the N800 and packs quite a punch. The slide-out keyboard is killer, GPS is a no-brainer these days and is included, the browser is Mozilla-based, the UI got a refresh… I could go on for days.

The other thing I really like about the new tablet is that the Maemo platform is moving to be even more open than it was before (which was about as open as the lawyers at Nokia would allow). The quite good but closed source Opera web browser has been replaced by one that is Mozilla-based. This is yet another major component that is now open instead of closed. The major closed-source components (if I’m remembering correctly) are now limited to the DSP, various binary drivers that Nokia licenses directly, and the handwriting recognition software. That’s definitely a smaller list than it was before, and I applaud Nokia’s efforts in opening up as much as possible. It’s also worth noting that the Ubuntu Mobile project is basing a lot of its work on the work that Nokia has done with Maemo (most notable Matchbox and the Hildon UI).

So yeah, I’m now paying much closer attention to this new device that I was doing my best to ignore. Job well done.

Everything was going great: the video showed a nice N-Series-style phone with a big touchable screen doing things that you’d expect an N-Series phone with a big touchable screen to do. And then about two minutes in they lost me. That’s when they showed the S60 touch interface being used with a stylus.

Come on Symbian. It’s not the 90’s anymore. My Palm III rocked because of its stylus and glorious grey screen, but that was almost a decade ago. Now that the iPhone has launched, there’s a certain expectation level for new mobile UIs.

Touch is one of those expectations. Having to use a stylus is not.

It’s also interesting to see this latest battle in the one-handed vs. two-handed war play itself out. It has always struck me that there is a split between these two factions within Nokia (and by extension within Symbian) but the public rarely sees it. I tend to lean toward the one-handed side myself but do see the merits that some two-handed devices have to offer from time to tim. I have both a 9290 and an N800 but the bulk of my mobile purchases have been one-handed devices.

I also think that S60’s one-handedness is one of the reasons that S60-based devices have been so successful. Nokia sold approximately 1.5 million N95’s in Q2 2007. Compare those numbers with a flagship device like a high end two-handed UIQ phone and I’ll bet that the two-handed numbers are significantly lower. Once you start including the entire one-handed range of Symbian devices, you have a force to be reckoned with.

I’m hoping that showing the stylus was meant to demonstrate that Symbian can support a stylus, not that most or many devices will. I’m encouraged a bit since S60 has recently taken on QWERTY capabilities and it makes sense to tout its versatility from single-handed to touch to stylus to QWERTY.

We’re still at the press release stage not the technical documentation stage, so there’s a lot of room for change. Lots of things mentioned in the press release strike me as good things: tactile feedback, backwards compatibility, in-browser flash support and a continuation of S60’s various sensor mechanisms.

But Symbian, here’s a bit of advice for you: downplay that stylus! Nobody wants to see it and it totally kills the mood when you use it on an otherwise sleek and sexy device.

I got my last issue of Business 2.0 in the mail today.

As predicted they’ve offered to send me one month of Fortune for every two months of my remaining subscription. I’ve been offered “equivalent” subscriptions for cancelled publications in the past, but never at a 1:2 ratio.

I might grab a copy of Fortune from the newstand to see if it’s worth it, but I feel like I get enough standard business news from Marketplace and various sources in my feed aggregator. Unless Fortune knocks my socks off I’ll be asking for a refund. It doesn’t help that I’m already unhappy with Fortune/CNN Money for killing my beloved publication.

Goodbye b2. You will be missed.

Of course 1.1.1 might have also started a cold war battle between Apple and hackers that sounds almost exactly like the moves that Sony pulled on the PSP. The latest move is very different than the Laissez-faire attitude Apple has taken toward hacking the Apple TV and the early iPhone. I never thought I’d see the day that Apple cribbed something from Sony’s playbook.

Perhaps it’s the difference between an indie/niche product and something mainstream like the iPhone. Perhaps it’s the added pressure of the carriers wanting super-locked down devices on their networks. (I doubt that though. Just grab a Symbian device and do with it as you please.) Perhaps it’s Apple realizing that it’s big enough that it can do as it pleases.

Then again, maybe they’re biding their time while they polish the official non-web-2.0 SDK. We can all dream, can’t we?

Pull up a chair and bring it close to the fire. Let me tell you about the golden age of the iPhone…

Getting started

GGeoXml and particularly clickable polylines are relatively new features, so we need to specify that we want to use beta features when we grab our google maps code:

<script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2.x&key=your_key_here" type="text/javascript"></script>

The key here is v=2.x which specifies that we want some 2.x or somewhat bleeding edge features. Now that we’ve got that loaded up, we’ll want to define a couple of variables:

var map;
var geoXml;

This set up two global variables that we’ll be using. While I’m not a big fan of polluting global namespaces, this will allow me to play with these variables via Firebug once the page has loaded. For non-sample production code you’ll want to properly namespace all of your work. Next we’ll grab some data using GGeoXml:

geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://example.com/path/to/data.kml");

This will grab data from the XML file. In my case it’s a list of things to do in and around Kansas City. Now that we have data in hand, let’s create a map and add this data as an overlay:

if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
  map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map_canvas"));
  map.setCenter(new GLatLng(38.960543, -95.254383), 9);
  map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
  map.addControl(new GLargeMapControl());
  map.addOverlay(geoXml);
} 

This should be pretty familiar if you’ve ever worked with the Google Maps API. We’re creating a new map using the div map_canvas in the document. Then we set the center of the map and add a few controls. Once we’re done with that, we’re going to add the geoXml that we loaded via KML to the map. Here’s the complete basic example:

Let Google do the hard stuff

You’ll notice that the basic map is centered manually and doesn’t really fill the whole viewport. GGeoXml has finished running, we can query it for useful information. For example, I can ask what its default center is from Firebug:

>>> geoXml.getDefaultCenter();
(39.076937, -94.601867) Uk=39.076937 La=-94.601867 x=-94.601867 y=39.076937

Knowing that I could then set the center of the map as follows:

map.setCenter(geoXml.getDefaultCenter());

While this handles setting the center correctly, it doesn’t help me figure out what zoom level to set. Luckily there is another method on GGeoXml objects: gotoDefaultViewport(map). I can then call the following and have Google do all the hard work of figuring out what center and zoom to use to make sure all of the KML/GeoRSS content fits within the viewport:

geoXml.gotoDefaultViewport(map);

This allows us to let Google create bounding boxes, find centers and zoom levels, which while interesting exercises aren’t fun to do on a daily basis. There’s one gotcha here though: you can’t get information about a GGeoXml instance until it’s done loading.

Are we there yet?

When we call GGeoXml, we can optionally provide a callback function that will be called as soon as GGeoXml is done doing its thing and we can access it. First let’s create a function that centers and zooms so that the data is contained nicely within the viewport:

var geoCallback = function()
{
  geoXml.gotoDefaultViewport(map);
}

Next we have to modify our call to GGeoXml to include the callback:

geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://example.com/path/to/data.kml", geoCallback);

Here’s the final code that includes the callback:

I hope that illustrates how much can be done with very little code. Definitely take advantage of the rich map annotating capabilities that Google’s My Maps offers and don’t be shy about including them in maps on your own site.