Google maps goes legit

I got an email from a local rider yesterday, telling me that my Cycling climbs webpage was broken. I did some investigation and found that Google had rev'd their software, and I would need to make some small changes to get my site up and running again.

I also found out that they released an official API for their maps. This is great news.

While I enjoy the intellectual aspect of doing a bit of reverse-engineering (which is something I've been doing in both hardware and software since... well, since I was a lot younger than I am now...), being at the whims of something that has no docs and can change under you isn't the best situation. I spent some time looking at their stuff last night, and while it looks like they don't have everything available from the API, it does enough for what I want. And there are some good examples for how to do things.

You do have to sign up to get a key for the API to work, which I think is more than reasonable. The key is associated with your website root, you put the key in your webpage, and then the google server will talk to you.

If you want to convert your existing maps, here's a decent post from somebody who's done the conversion.

There's also a new discussion group on the mapping api.

If you do anything particularly cool with the api, please link and/or comment so I can take a look.