WordPress Google Maps Plugin
Check out this very nice Google Maps Plugin for WordPress. With this you can simply upload a GPX, KML or KMZ file and add it to your your blog entry. Voila! An embedded map. It would be very keen if you could add several tracks and have them all added to the same map.
Beautiful Tracks on Google Earth
Many people aren’t yet aware of how versatile Google Earth is. The “plus” version allows you to easily import GPS tracks and even do real-time tracking. One great advantage to Google Earth are the large number of map overlays that are available. For example, you can overlay weather data (though, it’s difficult to find historic weather overlays), photos, trail maps and other sorts of map data. Very useful for us in search and rescue are topographic and aerial map overlays. The movie below illustrates how you can make a map that looks like this:
look more like this:
Here is a very nice close-up on the image above:
To import a track into Google Earth, drag a GPX file onto the Google Earth map. I actually use TopoFusion to download tracks and manipulate them. Then I archive the stored tracks on disk. Later, it’s easy to open them with any mapping application.
I also use overlay data. Google Earth now has street map data available from “layers”. You’ll also see how easy it is to show current weather. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to find historic weather. Weather Underground often has it. But you can’t show it on your map yet.
If you notice in the top image above, there is very little geographic detail available in the region shown. However, there are plenty of data overlay network links that you can add to display more detailed geographic data. What I use most frequently are maps generated from gpsvisualizer.com. To use these, download this KML network link file to your desktop and open it up in Google Earth.
Make sure you’ve zoomed in on the area you wish to look at in your map.
Then right click on the network link and “refresh”. Once you do that, you can expand the menu and see different sorts of imagery available for your region of interest. In the movie below, I download both USGC topographic maps and also USGC 1 meter imagery.
Once you’ve clicked on the imagery you want and then downloaded it from your browser, you can open it in Google Earth. Give the network links a bit of time to load. Once you do, you’ll be able to easily adjust transparency.
Without further ado, here’s the movie demonstration:
You can also download the corresponding imagery from the same webpage on GPSVisualizer.com that you downloaded the network links from. These you can save to disk and align if you expect not to have network access.
What we all want from Google is the ability to load file-based network links. Also, a much better way to cache map data. But… we’ll just have to wait. In the meantime, they continue to release more and more useful updates.
It’s not yet so easy to create tracks and upload them from Google Earth… but GPSVisualizer comes through yet again! Here is a great freehand drawing utility that let’s you save out GPX tracks that you can then upload on to your GPS (again, I use TopoFusion to handle most of my GPS data exchange). You can also open these up in Google Earth. Here’s a screenshot.
So now… you can give your subject a track to follow and put it on his GPS. Later, you can view your subject’s track and your dog’s track on a very detailed Google Earth map using your imagery of choice!