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 long does it take to get your blog listed on the search engines?

Shaun asks:

"how long does it take to get your blog listed on the seach engines? You can send your answer to my new blog http://shaungymcycle.blogspot.com If you're wondering I picked this site at random. Thanks for any help. Shaun."

Well, I'm glad my blogs are listed on the random blog selectors. As for yours Shaun, you'll find that blogger takes a few weeks to list your blog in its search directory. If you've got Adsense putting Google ads on your blog will speed it up.

You could try notifying non-Google search engines directly. www.freewebsubmission.com or www.submitexpress.com will speed up the process.

Once you're listed to notify blog updates directly try http://pingomatic.com .

Hope this helps, Shaun!