Evidence of an Ask.com mapping API?

Along with a lot of other people, we've been anxiously awaiting any news about an Ask.com mapping API. Why? Because Ask.com provides much better satellite imagery than Google. Check it out yourself. We REALLY want that on MyOutdoors.net.

So, what makes us think there's an API on the way? Well, IAC/InterActiveCorp, the ownerof Ask.com, also owns Evite, where the new Ask.com maps are now being used. I just happened to get an evite recently and and pulling up the source from a map on the evite shows us this little beauty:

<script type="text/javascript" 
  src="http://api.syndication.ask.com/maps/maps1.1.js"
<\script>

Well I did a wget on the file and a little bit of hacking to try to run it off of our local server, just to see if it would work. I got everything running, but no imagery :( I didn't look into it much further since I'm guessing they designed it that way.

MyOutdoors.net adds Google Co-op integration!

I've been wanting to do this for quite a while and I finally got around to it. Google Co-op is a great service that allows you to see relevant search results from a specific website right in your Google search results. In this case, if you are subscribed to our links, you will see search results from MyOutdoors.net when you search through Google. For example, I did a search in Google for "hiking," and this is what shows up for the subscribed links:

We added the keywords from the activity type (hiking, biking, etc.) to our RSS feeds so that the top entry will show up. In the future, we'll extend this even further so that you can add your own tags to journal entries and then more searches will end up hitting more entries on the site. We also want to add custom search to MyOutdoors.net so we can provide even more relevant search results to our users.

If you would like to subscribe, click on the button below:

Let us know what you think!

-Dale

Search for journal entries by location!

Continuing our quest to implement the most fully featured community mapping site available, we just completed location-based searching of journal entries on MyOutdoors.net. This feature integrates into the site extremely well, with lots of different options for finding journal entries.

To start, there is now a link at the bottom of every journal entry that says "Find nearby journal entries." It's right next to the distance field and looks like this:

The link will take you to the location search page to display all of the journal entries that are close by. It currently uses a default search radius of 150 miles (apologies to all you metric folks out there). It's kind a wide range, but we thought that you would want to see something rather than nothing, and for journal entries out in the middle of nowhere, it could be useful. Also, they're sorted by distance so the closest ones show up first. Once you're on the search page, you can change the search radius, or enter new search criteria.

Search criteria can be anything that Google can geocode, including cities, states, zip codes, etc. You can even enter a longitude and latitude. One of the cool things about it is that if you could link to the location page directly, passing in three parameters in the querystring. Just use http://www.myoutdoors.net/location.php? The parameters are:

lat (in degrees)
lng (in degrees)
distance

And then you can see all the journal entries that took place nearby.

There is also a new Location-based Search box on the Browse page. This is the entry to the location search for other search criteria.

Enjoy!