http://lehighfootballnation.blogspot.com

I wanted to announce this here since this is officially very very cool.

Using Google Maps' API, I've coded a special interactive map on my blog. Scroll to the bottom and see what I've done so far.

On a Google map of the northeast (you can click the map with your mouse and scroll the map any direction), I have placed icons depicting the logos of I-AA schools. If you click on (say) Lehigh's icon, information about Lehigh and their stadium appears in the left-hand pane, and in a text bubble over the map icon, you (in most cases) see a satellite image of the stadium! (In some cases, the zoom level isn't offered by Google Maps, so I try to zoom as low as I can.)

It looks a lot better in Firefox than IE, but it is dtill usable on IE. On IE some of the icon sizes are distorted, so (for example) St. Peter's icon is huge and overshadows other school icons. In that case, use the bar on the left to zoom in on the map.

This is in beta, so there are still some bugs - for example, some of the zooms do not fall precisely in the center of the stadiums after the zoom. Iona is stuck behind 3 different icons (4 or more on IE!), so to see that icon you'll ned to zoom in (that's not really fixable, really).

Right now I have on the map:
All the Patriot League
All the Ivy League
All the A-10
All the MAAC
All the NEC minus Robert Morris and St. Francis (PA)

The way I've designed the code, I don't see why I couldn't just keep going until I've added all I-AA teams. Boredom would be the only thing that could stop me.

Please take a look at it and give me any feedback or other ideas. I'm thinking of other information I can put in the information pane specifically, like school enrollment, a link to the schools' football website, (link to?) a weather report for the area, etc.