Jeffrey McManus

Here’s a Y! map of all San Francisco K-8 schools. I put this together several months ago but I decided not to release it until my kid got into kindergarten. (We are just that competitive with our four-year-old.)

We found this map to be very helpful last year when we were trying to figure out where to apply for Celeste. We obviously wanted her to get in somewhere "good" but we also didn’t want to have to drop her off in north beach every morning before turning around and commuting down the peninsula. We’re very excited that we got our first choice, which is the Spanish immersion program at Fairmount Elementary, about five minutes drive from our house. Muy bueno!

I need to go pick up a hard drive after work today, so since I was looking up the address of the Sunnyvale Fry’s store anyway, I copied and pasted all their Bay Area stores into my MapMaker spreadsheet template and made a Yahoo! Map of Bay Area Fry’s Electronics stores. Enjoy!

Just released a new version of my Excel spreadsheet that lets you plot data on a Yahoo! Map, this makes an adjustment to get around a server side change that made the template unusable by just about everybody. It’s now fixed, hooray!

People have asked me to add geocoding to this and I’ll try to get around to adding that, maybe over the holidays. I also want to add the ability to specify custom icons for each map position, which shouldn’t be too difficult.

  radar-map by jeffreymcmanus.

This is just amazing…Justin did a few fully interactive skins on top of our new maps product to demonstrate how you can use Flash to tailor maps to look like your web site.

Yahoo! Local GM and amateur blog critic Paul Levine and I are in IMs right now, watching the returns on the launch meander through the blogosphere via Technorati.

Paul Levine: btw, when you talk about only-at-yahoo features, i usually point to 5:
Paul Levine: 1) multi-point directions
Paul Levine: 2) drag-and-drop interactivity
Paul Levine: 3) reverse business lookup
Paul Levine: 4) address book integration / autocomplete
Paul Levine: 5) minimap
Paul Levine: plus things like traffic and send-to-phone which we launched almost a year ago and still noone else has
Jeffrey McManus: somebody should blog all that
Paul Levine: yea — who?
Jeffrey McManus: if only we knew somebody with a blog
Paul Levine: ha

New Yahoo! Maps release.

Also: new Yahoo! Maps APIs for developers, adding both Flash and Ajax APIs, geocoding, traffic, and the ability to embed maps on your own web site.

Party on.

Just posted an update that adds support for the Country tag (which lets our Canadian friends play) and fixes a bug that prevented some folks, particularly Excel 2000 users, from using the template.

Go git it.

Here’s a map of Dundee, a historic district of Omaha, that was plotted using the tool. Looks like the Dundee folks jettisoned their blog, too bad.

Here’s a new map, this time showing San Diego Trolley stations. I did this because I like trolleys and I like San Diego, and because Gina just moved there and I thought she might be able to use this.

(You’ll recall that in part 1, I plotted the locations of BART stations in honor of the fact that we moved to a new house close to BART.)

I may do Portland next. I’d love to tackle the whole NYC subway system, but copying and pasting that many locations into a spreadsheet* would be quite a task; those folks in the northeast take their rail seriously. Wonder if there’s a way to divide and conquer the work? Maybe I’ll just do the LIRR or Metro North to get warmed up.

*I wrote a spreadsheet tool to create these quickly. You’re welcome to use it too.

Update: Lifehacker calls the spreadsheet tool "fun and addictive" which is excellent because I’ve been trying to get people to call me that since junior high. Also, I got an email from one of our friends north of the border saying that this doesn’t work for Canadian addresses. It should. It’s my bad. I’ll work on that this week and post a revised version when it’s done. (This actually turned out to be pretty easy to fix: feast your eyes on Canadian provincial capitals.)

All of BART on a map, yo. I’d have pimped this earlier in the week but I got sidetracked with some other stuff.

I wrote a tool to make creating simple maps like this super easy. I’ll be releasing this tool soon so everybody can play. Until that happens, if you can hack together an XML file and put it on a Web server, you can play, too.