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Posts Tagged ‘google maps’

April Fools 2009

I can’t keep the pretense up any longer, I’m not really a bodybuilder and it’s not really my new web site.  I’ve been redirecting this site to my alter-ego at kevinblake.com all day long.  Fooled ya, didn’t I?

Kevin Blake - rumours of my career change have been greatly exagerrated

Rumours of my career change have been greatly exaggerated

Whilst rumours of my career change might have been greatly exagerrated, it’s been another good April Fool’s Day worldwide as individuals and businesses have thrown off any seriousness of the rest of the year by turning to Newsbiscuit-esque stories and ideas everywhere.  April 1st is of particular interest to me as a web developer, as an opportunity to proudly display the more playful side of a company, attract new audiences, and to make people smile.

So here are some of my favourites (apologies if a lot of these links don’t work.  Chances are, it’s not April 1st any more).  If you’ve been following me on Twitter today, you’ll have probably seen a lot of these already.

And lastly, in the papers…

Do you have any favourites I’ve missed?  Don’t forget, it’s never too early to start planning next years pranks 🙂

Travel map – countries visited

I’ve been looking for a good countries visited map for quite some time. There’s something satisfying about painting the world red (or in this case, orange), and something humbling about seeing massive chunks of the planet untouched. So since we’re approaching April and I’m getting the inevitable itchy feet again, I’ve gone hunting.

Up until now, World66 had seemed my only option. But in the Age of Google, posting images for this sort of thing seems a bit of a letdown. Fortunately 29travels have just the thing with their Google Map version.

Pretty cool but it’s a shame there doesn’t seem to be an option to edit the map. But, a quick look at the iframe source, and you can see it’s pretty easy to hack in any new countries as you visit. Providing you know the right country codes of course.

http://www.29travels.com/getmap.php?j=ALATBACYCZDEESFRGBHRISITMKMTMENLPLSITRUSVAVN&c=cc41c9f2&w=575&h=300

That query string is a long list of 2-digit country codes. So, if you know the code for the country you want to add, just adding it to the string will provide all the highlighting you need. For example Australia = AU

http://www.29travels.com/getmap.php?j=ALATBACYCZDEESFRGBHRISITMKMTMENLPLSITRUSVAVNAU&c=cc41c9f2&w=575&h=300

Who wants to package this up into a WordPress plugin for me? 🙂