Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 4, Mapping (on) the Web

#39 View Your Photo Thumbnails on a Flash Map

HACK

Adding Thumbnail Links to Your RSS Feed

For Movable Type, you can specify the URL of the image thumbnail as fol-

lows, in either the

keywords or text_more fields:

<meta>

<lat>36.9716 </lat>

<lon>-122.0253</lon>

<imgurl>/images/powerkite.jpg</imgurl>

</meta>

In order for MT to turn this into RSS, you’ll need to add following to your

RSS 2.0 template, inside the

MTMeta tag:

<MTMetaValueExists name="imgurl">

<photo:thumbnail><$MTMetaValue name="imgurl"$></photo:thumbnail>

</MTMetaValueExists>

Notice that we use a photo:thumbnail element to specify the location of the

thumbnail in the RSS feed. This means we’ll also have to declare the

photo

namespace in the RSS root node in the same template, as follows:

<rss version="2.0"

xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"

xmlns:photo="http://pheed.com/photo/">

For Radio Userland, the Location tool also provides this facility. Below the

post form, there’s an input field for the thumbnail URL. When you provide

a URL, it’s automatically added to the RSS feed.

Configuring worldKit to Display the Thumbnails

With the data feed in place, all that’s left to do is to install and configure

worldKit. worldKit relies on a file called config.xml for its configuration

details. Here’s an example:

<worldkitconf>

<width>500</width>

<height>250</height>

<displaytype>daynight</displaytype> ...