Craigslist and Google Maps Mashup Thingy: Day 10 – Custom Controls and Housekeeping
I guess this should count as the project’s 10th and 11th day, though I didn’t really spend too much time on either day, so let’s just roll them into one. After doing some CSS to overlay some divs over the Google Map, I found out there’s another way to do this: with “custom controls.”
The way that the custom controls work is both pretty sweet, and not that great. I don’t like having to add content to them by using javascript. It just doesn’t seem “correct” to do so, since I’m just overlaying normal html. So I’ll be using some custom controls, and some divs. The good thing about custom controls is that the map knows not to open infowindows under them when they’re opened up.
Besides that, I just did a lot of random work on getting the app to look a little better. Like showing the correct area based on which city’s listing you want to see. Overall, the project is coming along really smoothly, with very few roadblocks. I’m happy that it’s nearing completion. I really enjoy doing these one-man projects, since it lets me get experience in everything from database schema planning and optimizing, to php backend development, to designing the css for the content, and even maybe a little tweaking in the Apache server. I think once I add this project to my “real” server, I’ll need to get a ram upgrade.
I think the project should probably be ready to go live within a week. I dunno if I’ll actually try to get the word out, or just release it and see if people find it via Google or something. That’d be cool. Since there’s already a site that does a similar thing (though there’s a smaller number of supported cities), I don’t think what I’m doing is really that noteworthy. I think it’d be useful, though, so we’ll see if there’s any reaction at all to it.