Bluyah Development Blog

With version 0.4.4 of the code base we introduced Enhanced Maps which allow you to easily control the marker color and the contents of the “bubble” that displays when you click on the marker.  

With these new features, creating robust, data-driven maps become an extremely easy thing to pull off.

Case in point:

The USGS publishes an RSS feed that contains data on all of the earthquakes that have occurred over the past 30 days.   We went from feed to map in about 3 minutes by doing the following:

• I created a new Atom/RSS connector.  The input screen only required I give it a memorable name and input the feed’s URL.
• Once saved I clicked on the “Report” link for the newly established connector.  This brings up the Report Edit screen:

• On this page I changed the ‘pubDate’ column to ‘Reported’ and changed the ’summary’ column name to read ‘Earthquake’.  You change the column name by clicking on the name itself.  I also hid a couple of columns I didn’t need by clicking the [x] box in the upper-right of the column header.  
• Once I had saved the report (you can see the report in tabular format here - or as a CSV file here), I then clicked on the ‘Export’ link at the top of the screen, then the ‘New Map’ link and selected the newly created Report name.  The map edit screen has a few more configuration possibilities:

• Because the data elements ‘lat’ and ‘long’ already existed in the RSS feed, they were automatically selected as the fields to be used by ‘Latitude’ and ‘Longitude’.  (If my data set had contained street addresses instead, I would have clicked the ‘Plot by Geocode’ link instead )
• I only wanted the ‘Reported’ and ‘Earthquake’ columns from my report to show in the bubble that displays when a user clicks on a map marker, so I dragged them from the ‘Available Data’ box beneath the map, onto the bubble, and ordered them appropriately.
• Saving the map resulted in this: 

Let us know your thoughts.  Or better yet ~ create a map of your own and send us the link.  We’d like to see what you’ve done.

[UPDATE] A screencast of this tutorial can now be found here.