Google Maps API: Read the Documentation & Stay Away from Books

Know More: Applications, Google, HTML, PHP, code 2.0, HTML

After much trial and error, and a valuable lesson learned, I finally got the Google Map API figured out to the point that I could create my own map of Yakima Valley wineries.

All I wanted to do was create a Google map with markers for all of the wineries in the Yakima Valley. The markers would be clickable and the data would be conveyed via XML. I'm an intermediate coder when it comes to PHP/Javascript/XML - I know enough to work through more complex functions, but it takes me a lot of time. This project, however, wasn't supposed to be complex at all.
I'd just picked up a couple of books, O'Reilly's Ajax Hacks and SAMS XML in 24 Hours, showing exactly how to create a custom Google map using the API and some XML.

Unfortunately, both books used API functions that were discontinued in the newest version of Google Maps. About 4 hours was wasted on this - mostly because I wasn't sure if it was the code, the geocoordinates, or my XML that was truly the problem. It was a bit of each.

I kept my XML to the absolute basics to make sure it was perfect. I got a map with markers in the wrong places.

I'd looked up latitude and longitude at Geocoder.us, but the coordinates were wrong. Instead of being right downtown, one winery was shown as being 25 miles up in the Cascades.

I ended up using MapBuilder.net to get the coordinates. When the map finally worked, it seemed pretty accurate for the wineries that I knew cross-streets for, but I'm still going to check each one manually over the summer. Unfortunately, the first time I plugged in MapBuilder's lat and long, the marker was still off.

Finally, I erased a substantial part of the code and built it from scratch, using Google's own examples. That only took an hour and I should have trusted my abilities to work right from Google's documentation to begin with. It worked perfectly, with some trial and error on including HTML formatting within the XML document.

On the bright side, I fully understand everything in the code! I've also learned to use the book provided code as an example, but work from the API to confirm.

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