Not much Downtown news to post today, so I thought I’d mention a free tool that helped me recently.
I needed to build an application to place locations on Google Maps. So I was in the process of learning the Google Maps API, geocoding, latitudes, longitudes, and all that jazz.
While I was doing that, I learned of a free store locator offered by the website Zip-Codes.com. You simply sign up for an account, import your list of stores or locations via a CSV file, and Zip-Codes.com will geocode them for you. It will then give you several lines of Javascript to add to your site, and voila – your locations appear on a Google Map, you can search them by city/state or ZIP code, and it will even give you driving directions to the locations. Pretty cool for the price of free. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to put stuff on Google Maps but doesn’t want to do any programming.
Why do they offer this for free? Well, because the resulting Google Map contains a “powered by Zip-Codes.com” link. They’re hoping your site’s visitors click through to their site and buy some of their zip code search products.
They say the script can even be pasted into Facebook and MySpace pages, although I haven’t tried this.
Cool tool. I can think of a lot of uses for this.