I-AA Interactive Stadium Map - BETA

[Lehigh Football Nation]

http://lehighfootballnation.blogspot.com

I wanted to announce this here since this is officially very very cool.

Using Google Maps' API, I've coded a special interactive map on my blog. Scroll to the bottom and see what I've done so far.

On a Google map of the northeast (you can click the map with your mouse and scroll the map any direction), I have placed icons depicting the logos of I-AA schools. If you click on (say) Lehigh's icon, information about Lehigh and their stadium appears in the left-hand pane, and in a text bubble over the map icon, you (in most cases) see a satellite image of the stadium! (In some cases, the zoom level isn't offered by Google Maps, so I try to zoom as low as I can.)

It looks a lot better in Firefox than IE, but it is dtill usable on IE. On IE some of the icon sizes are distorted, so (for example) St. Peter's icon is huge and overshadows other school icons. In that case, use the bar on the left to zoom in on the map.

This is in beta, so there are still some bugs - for example, some of the zooms do not fall precisely in the center of the stadiums after the zoom. Iona is stuck behind 3 different icons (4 or more on IE!), so to see that icon you'll ned to zoom in (that's not really fixable, really).

Right now I have on the map:
All the Patriot League
All the Ivy League
All the A-10
All the MAAC
All the NEC minus Robert Morris and St. Francis (PA)

The way I've designed the code, I don't see why I couldn't just keep going until I've added all I-AA teams. Boredom would be the only thing that could stop me.

Please take a look at it and give me any feedback or other ideas. I'm thinking of other information I can put in the information pane specifically, like school enrollment, a link to the schools' football website, (link to?) a weather report for the area, etc.

[rokamortis]

Looks really cool.

[Hoo-ah]

Great job! Thanks

[Kaduce]

Awesome.

[th0m]

Awesome things! Keep up the amazing work!

[Umass74]

A link to a local weather report would make a cool app even cooler.

Nice work :)

[colgate13]

You working on it? I don't see any link in your blog.

[Lehigh Football Nation]

You working on it? I don't see any link in your blog.

Scroll to the bottom of the blog, and it should be there. It works best in Firefox 1.0.4, though it does work with IE6. The only problem I see on IE6 is that some of the icons are too big (Sacred Heart), or some of the icons have white space (Princeton) - but it appears to work fine.

If it is incompatible with any browser type, PLEASE let me know. I have had complaints that it doesn't work for some people.

[colgate13]

Now I see it. I was running a Javascript block that I needed to enable Blogger.com... Cool!

[blackfordpu]

Great job, cant wait to see the finished product. :) :cool:

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Update: Finished the NEC and added all of the the Big South, and fixed the centering and zoom levels on the Patriot and NEC schools.

Expanded the map a little bit so it's bigger.

Next up: I'm going to add the MEAC (yes, it's my East Coast bias crreping into my development schedule :D )

Please let me know if you can't see the blog on any specific browser type. It appears to work OK in IE6 and Firefox 1.0.4.

[colgate13]

Where are your plans for hosting this awesome map? Will you run it in your blog long term?

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Where are your plans for hosting this awesome map? Will you run it in your blog long term?

The map is going to be hosted on my blog permanently.. as long as the API is able to run on all browser types. If (say) older versions of IE can't run it, or Mac's, than I'd probably consider moving it elsewhere.

That's part of the reason why feedback is greatly appreciated, since I want to know if people are having problems.

Finally, in the non-sequitur to end all non-sequitiur's. not only was Garder-Webb a complete b*tch to locate (there's Boiling Spring, NC and Boiling SpringS, NC), their logo looks like the STP logo with GWU plastered on top. So, GWU, I beg of you, update your logo!

Charleston Southern's logo comes a close second for "worst logo so far".

[colgate13]

It really slows down your blog loading. I'll offer to run it on AGS if you want. Great work!

That's what I, um, was quietly suggesting. If it's a I-AA.org feature it would be linkable...

LFN - this type of work is what separates the men from the boys. I play with computers, you must play with one for a living!

[Lehigh Football Nation]

I do play with computers for a living for a living... :cool:... Must admit Javascript is not my specialty, but it's working out great so far. (I actually learned what my tags mean on my blog...)

Ralph, hosting it on I-AA.org sounds great to me. It will only get slower once I add the rest of the conferences anyway. How should I work this, should I finish up the rest of the teams/conferences, and the send you the code?

You'll also need a Google Maps API key, but that's easy to get, and free.

[blukeys]

I do play with computers for a living for a living... :cool:... Must admit Javascript is not my specialty, but it's working out great so far. (I actually learned what my tags mean on my blog...)

Ralph, hosting it on I-AA.org sounds great to me. It will only get slower once I add the rest of the conferences anyway. How should I work this, should I finish up the rest of the teams/conferences, and the send you the code?

You'll also need a Google Maps API key, but that's easy to get, and free.
Another excellent example of how the members of AGS make this site so great (no offense Ralph). We have the most awesome board and the best Poll of all I-AA and just keep getting better.

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Update:

MEAC added
SoCon added
OVC added

That's it for now!

Next up:
SWAC
Gateway
Southland
Big Sky
Great West
Indies
(probably in that order)

[JaxSinfonian]

LFN,

Nice job!

I use Microsoft's Streets & Trips software quite a bit, and it has the very useful capability of importing a data set of addresses and marking each unit on the map. What format is your stadium data in? Any chance I could get a copy from you to import into S&T?

[Lehigh Football Nation]

The data is in latitude and longitude format - I can get the information to you if your software can read that. Supposedly Google Maps can translate lat/long coordinates into street addresses, but it doesn't really work yet - maybe in the future.

[buckp]

Nice work.....:bow: It's neat to see where all the stadiums are located- great tool.

[Lehigh Football Nation]

The tool is promising to get even cooler. I found out how to make driving directions to a lat/lng point on Google Maps! I don't think I'll use real-time driving direction rendering on my map, but I'm hoping to have my code open up a new window with the driving directions to the stadium, with your specified city and state (at least) as the input!

I won't get to this until tonight, at the earliest.

I also have a way to make a Weather.com balloon with information about the weather at the stadium, but I can't make it work without XML, so right now it's on the back burner.

[Husky Alum]

Awesome!!! With 2 teams in metro Boston, I love how you put our logo over Harvard's (at least that's how it shows up on my computer)..no need to worry about them, people generally know where Harvard is. ;)

[JaxSinfonian]

LFN, latitude & longitude should be fine. I'll send you a private message with my e-mail address.

[Lehigh Football Nation]

The SWAC has been added. Next up: the Southland

Oh, yeah, and I got DRIVING DIRECTIONS working... check it out...

I'd be interested how accurate they are for schools like JMU and Colgate. See, some schools I can bullseye the icon right in the center of the stadium since the satellite images zoom in so close. However, with Colgate, JMU, Mississippi Valley State, etc., since the stadium is so small at that zoom-up, I've tried to make sure that the stadium is visible in the blow-up - not for driving-directions accuracy.

To the folks which are beta-testing this for me, what is more important, super-accurate driving directions? Or being able to see the stadium in the map blow-up?

[Lehigh Football Nation]

ALL THE SCHOOLS ARE IN!!! YAY!!!!

The map is bloody slow to load, however, on my (admittedly ancient) computer. I'd be curious to know if someone with a faster computer would let me know how it is loading for them.

FYI, I am working on learning some tricks to make the points load faster from the Google API Web forums.

[colgate13]

Isn't it ironic that someone who knows so much about computers claims to have an ancient model! LOL.

I have a super fast computer at work (at home now) so I'll give it a view on Monday.

[WYOBISONMAN]

Very nice......dog gone engineers are pretty creative!

[rokamortis]

I'm on cable with a decent machine, but not the fastest and it takes a while to load. But once it does it is great.

[igo4uni]

Good work LFN!!

peace

igo4uni

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Update. Sorry I haven't been responding to private messages since I've been busy trying to make this into a usable map. Once I added all 120 I-AA schools, I was getting 1-2 minute performance drags on initial loads and on clicking the markers. That simply won't do.

First change was: I put in a hack to try to load the markers quicker. It appears to work, though it still takes 10 seconds or so to load all the markers. Not much I can really do about that, unfortunately, though it's better than before.

As for the clicking of the markers, I found out after playing with the Google API that putting the cute map blowup in a text window was killing my performance, so I made a programming change. Now, when you click a marker, you automatically zoom on the main map to the stadium at the best available zoom level. When you close the text balloon, you then zoom back out to the Google map. It works much much faster.

Now, since my slow computer can handle it, I think that other computers should be able to handle it as well. I will probably make some very small tweaks to it, but after that I'm going to call it good I think. I'm talking about centering the icons on certain stadiums, fixing zoom levels, etc.

[blackfordpu]

Good job LFN and thanks for all of the hard work. :) :nod:

[Engineer91]

Unfortunate that some of the satellite images are out of date. The field for Georgetown is the one on top of the building where Lehigh played about 4 or 5 years ago. The current field is ... well a field.


Somehow, when clicking Cornell I was taken to Azerbaijan ... I know Ithaca is out there ... but not that out there. I tried it again and ended up in Ithaca so it must have been user error.

[Engineer91]

I'm talking about centering the icons on certain stadiums, fixing zoom levels, etc.


Are you going to un-center some so that you see the stadium or at least some of Hamilton NY :D

It is pretty cool that in the high res areas where you can read the field, like at Howard. Where any of the satellite images durring a game?

[colgate13]

I loaded in under 5 seconds using both Firefox 1.04 and IE 6.02 sp2. I think I've got a pretty fast computer to test with too. I've got a Pentium 4 3.00 GHz with 1 GB of RAM and a 3743.1 Kbps connection (T3) according to running CNET's bandwith test. Can someone beat that?

[Lehigh Football Nation]

Are you going to un-center some so that you see the stadium or at least some of Hamilton NY :D

It is pretty cool that in the high res areas where you can read the field, like at Howard. Where any of the satellite images durring a game?

With these logos, and where there are schools with no hi-res satellite images, there's a tradeoff - either you get the logo right on the stadium (making the driving directions more accurate, while obscuring the satellite view), or you put it off-center (making the directions less accurate, but you can sort of see the stadium). Furthermore, sometimes they're just small dots on the screen, very hard to find, so I'm not sure of the value of showing them.

I don't know how old the satellite images are - I wish they were more accurate in some places (Stony Brook leaps to mind - come on, you don't have a satellite image of Long Island?). I don't know Google's plans to update their satellite images - I'd hope that they would improve those images too.

I'll probably move Cornell & Colgate so you can see their stadiums better.

[UAalum72]

I don't know how old the satellite images are - I wish they were more accurate in some places (Stony Brook leaps to mind - come on, you don't have a satellite image of Long Island?). I don't know Google's plans to update their satellite images - I'd hope that they would improve those images too.

Although Google say "Satellite images are current, but not real-time", going by the construction I see, the images are about three years old. Mapquest used to have more photos with greater detail, but dropped them last year, possibly during an orange terror alert. This is a beta version of Google, so they may get better.

[colgate13]

Google bought Keyhole which is this amazing world wide sat. pictures system with demographic information all over it. I see they are now calling it Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) and it's free. I'm going to download that and give it a shot and see how good it is!

[Engineer91]

Google bought Keyhole which is this amazing world wide sat. pictures system with demographic information all over it. I see they are now calling it Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) and it's free. I'm going to download that and give it a shot and see how good it is!

Google Earth rocks!

Turn on buildings and look at downtown Washington in 3D then "fly" out to Mt St Helens or the Grand Canyon.