Created Virtual Earth Collections Block in Popfly
I like using the collections feature in Live Search Maps where I can keep collections of locations. One of the activities that I wanted to do was share a collection on my blog as an embedded map.
Unfortunately this isn’t one of the out-of-the-box features of Live Search Maps, so I decided to use Popfly to do it. Since Popfly can use a Virtual Earth control and the Live Search maps can emit the collection as GeoRSS, I was able to create a simple mash-up that took the GeoRSS feed and put it into a map. This wasn’t my favorite approach because I knew that the Virtual Earth control could natively use the Live Search Maps collections. So here is where I created a new Virtual Earth block in Popfly that had some new functionality:
- It was based on the newest Virtual Earth API: 6.2
- It would read the Live Search Maps collection natively
- I wanted to add the option to show the map as a road map without the aerial imagery
I was able to do this by creating a new block based on the existing Virtual Earth block and adding the new method and properties for the new functionality. You can now use the block (Virtual Earth 6_2) or the mash-up to create your own embeddable map with a collection:
