How can I add a map with Google Page Creator?

Maybe I'm no longer a complete novice! Can you believe I actually put a map on my Melbourne Advice blog last week? I chanced on a discussion group where people were spending pages describing the locations of Melbourne's University campuses and thought what they really needed was a good map. The problem was how to do it.

There's a google widget you can use to add a map to your webpage, but it wouldn't let me mark any of the campuses. I looked at the Google Maps API page & couldn't make any sense of it. In desperation I created a map on google's new mymap feature, and put a link on my blog. To be honest, I wasn't satisfied though, because the link isn't very obvious. In the end I found detailed instructions on Beta Blogger For Dummies. It took about ten hours to find the appropriate instructions, put the CSS and HTML code into my template, shift it around the blog page & sort out how to link to the map I'd created in mymap, which is where Google Page Creator came in.

I found out pretty early in this whole blogging experience that there are some things which Blogger just can't do. One of the more annoying things is that it can't host a file online. Google Page Creator appeared a few months ago and promptly disappeared into oblivion. Personally I couldn't really see the point of it. No pretty templates, no widgets, no nothing. But hidden in the link function is the ability to upload a file (say my map's data file) and host it online. I can call on the file from blogger, link to it. People can download it. I've called on a map file from within my blogger template to display the map using the new GGeoXml constructor. Building on the code from Beta Blogger For Dummies, I put the line
var geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://myaccount.googlepages.com/mymap.kml")
after the line
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map")) and now the map I made in Google's mymap facility is now visible on my site!

Watch this space for more uses for Page Creator, but in the meantime, you can see from the map on melbournepricecheck.blogspot.com why there was so much confusion about campus locations.

How do I get my users to rate my posts?

I'd like to set up a rating system so the jokes on jokevault.blogspot.com can be rated by my readers. I'd like a new reader to be able to go straight to the highlights & skip the bad jokes.

I found two options for blogger:

1. A star rating system which you have to add manually to each post on your blog at www.majikwidget.com . That's the one I've got on this post. Its great if you only have 25 posts or less to rate - its free - an you can put the widget on any post without changing your template.


2. Spotback have a widget which you can put in the template and the rating appears on all your posts. Its much less hassle than putting the code on every post & its free for any number of posts. I'm giving it a spin on jokevault.blogspot.com .

MyLot

MyLot - another way of not earning anything while spending hours & hours online.

Here's how it works:
1) Discussions:
You earn 1-3 cents by responding to a topic or starting a new topic.

2) Photos: You get 1 cent for loading a photo into a discussion topic.

3) Referrals: You'll collect 25% of their earnings. Boost my earnings & pay my electricity bill by joining from myLot User Profile!

No? Well I suppose I'll go back to MyLot to build up the 500 discussions, replies and photos I'll need to get a $10 Paypal payment. Probably.