How not to make a self-updating gig map

As my web operation, The Music Quarter (an MA project) is a website aimed at promoting up-and-coming local artists in Birmingham, it primarily revolves around gig listings. Therefore, I thought trying to map local gigs on a daily basis for the reader (as there are often a number of gigs in local venues across the city on any one night) would be an experimental form of online journalism. However I already knew how to do that, and thought it would be better if the map could update itself somehow so I didn’t have to input data every single day so that soon became the focus of my research.

Unfortunately I was unable to find a way to make a map update itself. Here I will explain what I did and consequently what I learnt from my mistakes.

Research

First of all, I made accounts with several different online tools that used Google maps and experimented with them briefly. I found Mapalist.com would pull data from a Google Spreadsheet easily enough and would update itself automatically when you amended the spreadsheet. However, as far as I could see, Mapalist didn’t explain any way of formatting the spreadsheet so that it would automatically update the map according to the date which is what I was after.

Drawing your own maps like Quikmaps enabled you to do didn’t seem appropriate and I didn’t want to add moving maps to a video like VisualPin would allow. Geocoding images with Zonetag or Robogeo wasn’t relevant either. I had some experience of using Umapper.com for promoting gigs before and thought it looked good but it was only really suitable for displaying a small number of gigs over a short period of time and didn’t have a self-update option either. Similarly, Nearby.org.co.uk didn’t appear to have a spreadsheets option.  And so it seemed the only obvious and viable option to explore was using Spreadsheet Mapper.

Several searches on Google with terms such as ’self-updating Google maps’ came to no avail. A lot of searches came up with results that talked of coding which I didn’t understand. Experience of coding would have been very useful with this research and may have been the key to finding an answer.

What I Did

Having found some instructions on how to use Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0 I followed these. I found Spreadsheet Mapper allows you to enter data in to a Google Document from which a set of placemarks can be generated in Google Earth and Maps. I read ‘instantly publishes updates’ and assumed this meant I could format the spreadsheet to update itself for a period of time.

I opened the ’starter spreadsheet’ in Google Documents and made it public by publishing it as a web page. By copying a link to the published data and inserting this into the started spreadsheet, I was able to generate a ‘View Placemarks in Google Maps’ link in KML.  Here, I could pick from a variety of six templates. Next, I entered placemark names and locations on the PlaceMark date sheet for eight gigs spanning four days to use as a test map. To find latitude and longitude coordinates, I added a mapplet to my Google Maps tab which simply provided coordinates when I searched for each gig venue.

Then I applied a template to each marker according to how I wanted the gig to be promoted in terms of an image, links and text. On the PlaceMark data sheet there was an option to enter a ‘TimeStamp’ or ‘TimeSpan’ which I assumed meant entering a time or date during which the placemark would appear on the map. Before spending a long time researching and experimenting with different date and time formats it became clear afterwards that this was not the case and from what I gather, both just mark a period in time and do not actually affect the visibility of the placemark.

Results

Not knowing this yet, I published changes and shared the layer in Google Earth which I had to download. By right-clicking on the network link I was able to download a KML file which I could post on the website. When it came to trying to embed the layer, I uploaded the file onto this blog instead of the website because I just wanted to test it first. I used the ‘Embedded KML Viewer’ gadget to try and change display settings before generating code to embed on to my blog. Once I had this, I copy and pasted the HTML onto a new blog post and previewed it (see below). The problem was that all the placemarks were viewable no matter how I adapted the ‘TimeStamp’ and ‘TimeSpan’ so it was at this point I realised my experiment hadn’t worked and I would have to input data manually to provide the reader with a Google map of up-and-coming gigs

If you have the answer, please let me know!