AvantBlog

So, it looks like Google Maps recently changed a bit of their interface that breaks my previous GMapsShowCenter bookmarklet. Luckily, we don’t even need that bookmarklet anymore.

A friendly fellow geocacher made a slight tweak to my GoogleMapIt bookmarklet that takes care of adding the point to the map (basically you just need to pass in the point coordinates in the query string with the ‘q’ variable).

Here’s the updated version, which works great. Thanks to geocacher Sugarcrum for the tweak!

GoogleMapIt <- drag this to your bookmark bar.

This weekend, I spent a few hours learning a little bit about hacking Google Maps and making my own bookmarklets to help with Geocaching. Here’s what I came up with…

GoogleMapIt – a bookmarklet that finds the first instance of Latitude/Longitude coordinates (written in degrees and minutes) on a web page, converts them to decimal degrees, and opens a new window showing that location using Google Maps (Google Maps wants decimal degrees for loading lat/lon maps).

GMapsShowCenter – a bookmarklet that creates a location marker in the center of the Google Map you’re currently viewing. Helpful for when you’ve just loaded some latitude/longitude coordinates into Google Maps and need to see the marker for where they point to (by default, Google Maps doesn’t show a location marker when you load lat/lon maps).

Example usage:

1. Add GoogleMapIt and GMapsShowCenter to your browser’s bookmarks bar by dragging these links there (or add to Favorites in IE).
2. Load the page for any geocache, like The White Duck (my cache).
3. Click on the GoogleMapIt bookmarkelt in your browser’s bookmark bar.
4. Click on the ShowCenterMarker bookmarklet.
5. Admire the location of the cache.