map a list

Allow your Member/User Base to Add Pins to your Map Using Google Forms

2010-11-28T10:34:00.018-05:00

As the MapAList user base has grown over the past couple of years, one of the things we’ve noticed is that we have a ton of organizations leveraging our toolset to map their member/user bases. Religious organizations use MapAList to track their congregations; alumni associations use MapAList to track their members; campaigns and non-profits use MapAList to track their supporters/donors…you get the point.

The reason I bring this up is because a few of these organizations have gotten smart and realized that they could push the work of updating their maps out to the user based directly using Google Forms. It’s like self check-out at the grocery store – the users love it because they are empowered (and because it’s a novelty to scan those barcodes) and so does the store because it reduces labor.

Sounds cool – right? Well, implementing such a solution on your site with MapAList is not terribly difficult. Those folks at Google have made Google Forms easy to design and feed to a Google Spreadsheet. We at MapAList have made it easy to transform that Google Spreadsheet into a map.

Here’s the process – step by step – to make it happen…

Create a Google Form

The form creation process can be done in 1 of 2 ways – either you can create your spreadsheet and then create a form based on that spreadsheet (recommended) or you can create the form from scratch. For our purposes, let’s focus on the former.

1. Go ahead and create a new Google Spreadsheet like you would normally do – from Google Documents simply click on Create New and then select Spreadsheet.

2. Add header columns that you would like users to fill in to support the mapping process (e.g. name, address, city, state, zip, etc.). Also add at least 1 record - perhaps existing data that you have or your contact information.

3. Save your Spreadsheet and give it a name.

4. On the toolbar, click on Form and select Create a Form

At this point, Google should present you with a very basic looking Google Form that contains the columns that were on your Spreadsheet.

5. Edit your form as you see fit. You can do a lot of things with the form – such as add a theme, edit the “type” of each field, make fields mandatory. I’m not going to go into all of the details associated with this process as our friends at Google have already done that here: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=15166

6. Once you feel good about your form, go ahead and save it by clicking on the Save button in the upper right hand corner.

7. Embed the your new Google Form in your Website

Google makes this process pretty easy. All you have to do is click on More Actions and select Embed. Google will then present you with the HTML required to embed the form you have created into your website.

And we’re done...now all you have to do is create a map in MapAList that uses the Spreadsheet you created for this process and embed that in your website as well (see working form and map below - feel free to add your info if you like).

A couple things to keep in mind when using Google Forms to feed your MapAList spreadsheet:

1. You’re relying on the user to input correct information – if they make an error you’ll have to fix it within the spreadsheet, so taking a look every once in a while is probably good practice.

2. Pins will not show up immediately after a user enters their information due to the fact that the MapAList auto-update process runs overnight. I’d suggest that you make it clear to your users that this is the case. Otherwise they will enter their info, not see it immediately reflected on the map, enter it again, get frustrated, and leave the site. You will, in turn have multiple entries in your spreadsheet for the same user along with someone who is frustrated. Neither of these things are good. Note that you can always go to the Manage page in MapAList and update your map "on demand" in order to see information that has been entered into the form show up on the map prior to the nightly update.

Concentration/Heat Maps Are Here!

2009-11-07T11:41:00.008-05:00

Hello MapAList Faithful - it's been a while!

Our most recent release includes a new map type called "Concentration/Heat Map."

This new map type is great for large data sets with many addresses. It essentially creates a map in which the density of color (red) displayed is higher in areas with more addresses.

The creation process is super simple...just choose "Concentration/Heat Map" in step 4 of the mapping process and you're good to go. Check it out:

The rest should be very straightforward with a result that looks like the map you see below (note that I have about 4000 points in my Google Spreadsheet):

Unfortunately, right now Concentration/Heat Maps don't allow you to see actual points on the map or click on them and get a pop up bubble, but if you have a big data set this might be just what you're looking for.

If you have a large data set, give it a go and see what you think...

A MapAList Milestone - 5000 Users!

2009-03-15T16:09:00.010-04:00

Roughly 18 months ago we launched MapAList with no publicity whatsoever. Brian, our founder, head developer, and resident visionary, shared his excitement around the solution with friends and family triggering our user base to slowly begin growing.

Within a few months a handful of publications picked up on the simplicity and utility of MapAList and started to help us spread the word. LifeHacker.com was one of the first and gave us a huge boost. A week or so later The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinal, and The Baltimore Sun featured MapAList in their "How 2" column and things really started to heat up.

From churches and wine distributors to real estate agents and news organizations, our users were finding creative and unique ways to make the most of MapAList.

International press soon followed with articles in Russian, Indian, and French publications just to name a few. An influx of Brazilian users soon made us aware that we had been featured in Info Exame (a highly-popular Brazilian technology magazine). Users all over the world were leveraging MapAList to visualize their lists and share them with their own user bases on the web.

On March 14th, 2009 at 9:53 AM Eastern time, our 5000th user created an account and began visualizing his lists using MapAList.

This marked an incredible milestone for the MapAList team. Thank you all for your enthusiasm around our solution and your excellent questions, comments, and ideas that ultimately make MapAList better.

Also, thank your for your donations - they are much appreciated and help keep our free service afloat. Please keep them coming...

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)

Do You Live In Atlanta, GA?

2009-03-15T15:53:00.007-04:00

If so you should definitely check out our most recent endeavour - an IPhone app called AreYouSafe Atlanta.

AreYouSafe Atlanta lets you know how safe you are at any given time based on your current location within the city. All it takes is a quick tap to see a simple visual depiction of your safely level in addition to hyperlocal crime data broken down by type. Detailed crime statistics for the entire city of Atlanta, GA are pushed through a series of algorithms before producing a relative safety level for your exact geographic location.

Walk/drive/bike/bus/canoe around the city and see your safety status update as you go!

More cities coming soon...

Do You Live in Washington, DC?

2009-02-14T09:36:00.016-05:00

If so you should definitely check out our most recent endeavour - an IPhone app called AreYouSafe DC.

AreYouSafe DC lets you know how safe you are at any given time based on your current location within the city. All it takes is a quick tap to see a simple visual depiction of your safely level in addition to hyperlocal crime data broken down by type. Detailed crime statistics for the entire city of Washington, DC are pushed through a series of algorithms before producing a relative safety level for your exact geographic location.

Walk/drive/bike/bus/canoe around the city and see your safety status update as you go!

More cities coming soon...

Adding Images & IFrames to your Map Points

2009-01-28T16:57:00.004-05:00

What are we talking about here?

So let’s say you have a map that depicts all of the countries you have visited. It’s one thing to have a pin in France and show “Paris, 2008” in the pop up bubble, but it would be a heck of a lot cooler if you could click on that pin and see an image of you next to the Eifel Tower.

Alternatively, maybe you’re looking to provide some information about France to the person looking at the map. The ability to integrate an IFrame into the pin pop up bubble makes it easy to show the user a fully functional website about French tourism when they click on the pin.

If you followed the couple tutorials that talked about hyperlinks, e-mail and Skype this should be a piece of cake…

What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective?

Just like our last 2 tutorials, the key here is all in the way you enter data into your Google Spreadsheet. Again, a bit of HTML is all you need.

Take a look at the second column in the spreadsheet titled Image. It contains the HTML required to place an image in your pin pop up bubble.

The third column (you will have to scroll right), titled IFrame, contains the HTML required to display an IFrame in your pin pop up bubble.

Feel free to us the CONCATENATE function to make life easier if you want as explained in the a previous post (Adding Hyperlinks to Your Map Points).

The HTML, while a bit more complex than that needed to produce e-mail and Skype links, is still relatively self explanatory. In both cases, all you are doing is providing the location of the Image/IFrame. The IFrame requires some sizing – feel free to play with that to make it appear how you like it.

You guessed it - from here, all you have to do is assign your fields in Step 2b of the map creation process and you're good to go. If you have questions feel free to post to the help forum.

What does it look like from a map perspective?

As you might expect, we see the 2 pins plotted on the map below. When you click on the pin in France you will see an image of the French flag (sorry, I didn’t have a picture of you next to the Eifel Tower).

Okay, now try clicking on the other pin – which happens to be in Israel. Give it a second because just like any web page it takes a second to load. Cool, right – you actually see a website in the bubble with tourist info.

Your toolbox should be starting to fill up now…have fun with it,

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)

Adding Email & Skype to Your Map Points

2009-01-11T17:15:00.010-05:00

What are we talking about here?

Lots of folks use MapAList to share contact information above and beyond just physical addresses. We see maps all the time that include email addresses and/or phone numbers in the pin pop up bubbles. What you may not know is that it's easy to make those email addresses and phone numbers "active". In other words, you can create your map such that someone looking at it can click on the values in the pin pop up bubbles to initiate an email or a phone call (via Skype). This makes your map more way more interactive. Let's take a look at how it's done...

What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective?

Just like hyperlinks, the key here is all in the way you enter data into your Google Spreadsheet. A little HTML does the trick. Using "mailto" and "callto" make this a pretty straightforward process.

Scroll to the right in the frame below and take a look a the third column in the spreadsheet titled E-mail Link. It contains the HTML required to initiate a clickable email link in your pin pop up bubble.

The fourth column, titled Phone Link, contains the HTML required to initiate a clickable email link in your pin pop up bubble. Note that the callto tag can be followed by either a telephone number or a Skype ID. Either will work as long as Skype is configured to "Associate Skype with callto: links: in the SKYPEMENU>TOOLS>OPTIONS>ADVANCED OPTIONS.

Feel free to us the CONCATENATE function to make life easier if you want as explained in the last post (Adding Hyperlinks to Your Map Points).

The HTML is pretty self explanatory so I'm not going to dive into it. From here, all you have to do is assign your fields in Step 2b of the map creation process and you're good to go. If you have questions feel free to post to the help forum.

What does it look like from a map perspective?

As you might expect, we see the 2 pins plotted on the map below. When you click on either pin, you will see 2 links in the pop up bubble. If you click on the first one, MapAList will initiate an email to help@mapalist.com. If you click on the second one MapAList will initiate a Skype call to the MapAList help desk.

This is super simple and super powerful. Give it a try for yourself.

Hope this was helpful...more to come.

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)

Adding Hyperlinks to Your Map Points

2008-12-30T19:11:00.018-05:00

What are we talking about here?

The ability to visualize a list of addresses on a map is definitely useful - and it's what we're all about here at MapAList. Leveraging hyperlinks within maps makes them even more interactive for you and your users.

In this first post about hyperlinks, the goal is to show you how to associate a link to a website with a pin on your map. This will allow whomever is viewing your map to click on a pin and see hyperlinks in the bubble that pops up. Furthermore, it will enable the viewer to click on the hyperlinks to navigate to a URL directly from the map.

Sound cool? It is. Sound hard? Don't worry, we'll walk you through it...

What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective?
There are 2 approaches to making this work, one certainly more efficient if you are dealing with multiple address records.

In the sample spreadsheet below, you can see a column called Site which is used to associate the address with a website (URL). You can see that in the Site column the MapAList URL has been inserted (http://www.mapalist.com). The next column is called Site Link (you'll have to scroll to the right on the IFrame below to see it). Here's where those 2 different approaches come in...

1. You can simply enter the HTML in the cell. In other words, you can type in the following:

<a target='_new' href='http://mapalist.com'>MapAList HQ</a>

2. In order to avoid typing the HTML out for every record, you can use the CONCATENATE function and reference the cell in the Site column that contains the URL. Instead of entering the HTML in cell D2 (column 4 row 2), you would enter the following:

=CONCATENATE("<a target='_new' href="', C2,'">", A2,"</a>")

So what the heck do those HTML tags mean?

This isn't a HTML tutorial, but we can still break it down for you briefly...

<a target='_new' href='http://mapalist.com'>MapAList HQ</a>

target='_new' - the target attribute tells your browser to open the link in a new window

href='http://mapalist.com' - the link URL tells your browser what URL to open in that new window

MapAList HQ - the link text defines what will be displayed (and clickable)

Okay, you've got the link in the spreadsheet - now what?

This is the easy part. All you have to do is referance the column in the spreadsheet that contains your link in Step 2b where you assign your fields to your map. Simply select column that contains the links as either the Title or Additional Info values so that they will show up in the bubble when you click on the map pin. That's all you have to do.

Click on the image above to take a closer look

What does it look like from a map perspective?

So give it a try - click on the green pin on the map below and you'll see MapAList HQ in the pop up bubble. Click on MapAList HQ in the pop up bubble and a new browser window will open up to http://www.mapalist.com.

What are other users doing with this feature?
The use of hyperlinks within maps is quickly becoming a very popular feature. The most common uses to date are:

•Mapping companies and linking to their homepages

and

•Mapping friends and linking to their Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, or Blog pages

So get creative and give it a try!

Hope this was helpful...more to come.

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)

Advanced Grouping to Show Differentiation

2008-12-28T12:58:00.002-05:00

What are we talking about here?

So basic grouping was, well, a bit basic wasn’t it? When I ran through it with my wife for the first time she was rather impatient and starting asking me why she couldn’t change the pin colors/styles. I explained that she could and that I would walk her through it in the advanced grouping tutorial.

Advanced grouping enables a lot more than simply grouping based on distinct values in a column. With advanced grouping, MapAList supports the use of operators and comparison values to create grouping rules. It then allows you to choose the pin image associated with each group. Let me show you what I mean…

What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective?

In the sample spreadsheet below (which should look familiar), you can see a column called Response which is used to differentiate each address as coming to the wedding (Yes), not coming (No), or no response (Empty). So let’s see what we get when we map this sheet…

What does it look like from a map perspective?

What you can see is that MapAList plotted red pins for addresses that had responded No, Green Pins for addresses that responded Yes, and yellow pins for addresses that did not have a response (empty). Coincidence on the colors? I think not. MapAList’s advanced grouping feature allows the user to choose the pin color/type associated with each group. I’ll explain how in just a minute.

Okay – so walk me through it step by step…

The process is very much like making a basic map that shows all addresses – the key difference is in Step 4 – Configure Map below:

Step 4 – Configure Map

Specify the Setting Type as Advanced – this will give you the opportunity to specify your grouping criteria.

Click on the image to take a closer look

Now you can specify your criteria using the simple user interface. Here’s what I did:

Specified that I want to evaluate the Response column in my worksheet.
Specified that I want MapAList to look for addresses in my worksheet where the value in the Response column is = “equal to” the Comparison Value of No.
Specified in the Criteria Description field that my map key should call these addresses out as Not Attending.
Clicked on the … box and selected the red pin image to use for addresses that are Not Attending.
Clicked on the Plus button to add conditions for my other 2 situations – addresses that are attending and addresses that have no response yet (empty).

Click on the image to take a closer look

Click on the Preview Map button to display your map. The pin images you selected for each condition will display.
Click on the Next button.

Step 5 – Save Map

Modify Additional Settings as you see fit.
Click on the Save & View Map button.
Click on the Close This, and Create New Map button.

Give it a try and let us know what you think...

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)

Basic Grouping to Show Differentiation

2008-12-27T18:53:00.000-05:00

What are we talking about here?

Creating basic maps that simply map all addresses are useful, but grouping allows you to kick things up a notch.

Let’s say you are mapping your wedding attendee list for your wedding website and want to allow the map viewer to easily differentiate between the bride’s family and the groom’s family. MapAList has a Map Type built to handle just that – it’s called Group by Distinct Column Values (using unique pin images) and can be selected in Step 4 – Configure Map of the map creation process.

This Map Type allows you to tell MapAList which column in your worksheet contains the grouping attribute. MapAList then examines the values in that column and assigns a unique pin image to each distinct value. Running with the wedding example, what this means is that you would need a column in your worksheet that associates each address with the bride or groom…let’s take a look at an example.

What does it look like from a spreadsheet perspective?
In the sample spreadsheet below, you can see a column called Group which is used to distinguish each address as a member of the bride’s family, a member of the groom’s family, or a friend. Note that you may need to click on the image below and drag to the right to see this column (due to the way Blogger sizes iframes). I could have called the column anything I wanted – for example Family or Side, MapAList doesn’t care. I could also have additional values in the Group column – for example Groomsmen and Bridesmaids. The point I’m trying to get across is that the number of groups is not limited to 3. You could have 50…all MapAList needs to know is the name of the column that contains the grouping attributes. So let’s see what we get when we map this sheet…

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pqacvdx2XdPdkS4tSqvidBA

What does it look like from a map perspective?

What you can see is that MapAList selected red pins to represent the addresses associated with the bride’s family white pins to represent the groom’s family, and green pins to represent friends. If my worksheet had contained addresses with a Group called Groomsmen, we would have seen a 4th pin type on the left side of the map that represented the Groomsmen addresses and the associated pins on the map.

Okay – so walk me through it step by step…
The process is very much like making a basic map that shows all addresses – the key difference is in Step 4 – Configure Map below:

Step 4 – Configure Map
•Choose Group by Distinct Column Values (using unique pin images).

Click on the image to take a closer look

•Choose the Column that contains the attribute that you would like to group by.

Click on the image to take a closer look

•Click on the Preview Map button to display your map. A unique pin image will represent each distinct column value in the column you selected.
•Click on the Next button.

Step 5 – Save Map
•Modify Additional Setting as you see fit.
•Click on the Save & View Map button.
•Click on the Close This, and Create New Map button.

What are other users doing with this feature?
So now that you know how to use Basic Grouping to Show Differentiation, give some thought to how you might use it. Other users have used grouping to differentiate between:

•Bride’s and groom’s friends/family (you saw that one coming)
•Sales targets that are hot/medium/cold
•Clients using specific versions of a their software
•Types of crimes committed in a specific area
•Regular and premium users of a website
•Destinations visited in 2008, 2007, 2006, etc.

•Comment and us how you're using Basic Grouping

Hope this was helpful...more to come.

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)

Taking your Maps to the Next Level

2008-12-24T16:28:00.004-05:00

As our user count has steadily grown, the MapAList support team has received an increasing number of calls and e-mails from users looking to do more with our solution. Over 80% of the feature requests we’ve received are, well, features that already exist within the base MapAList solution.

What does that tell us?

What it tells me is that we need to do a better job articulating the feature set MapAList has to offer out of the box...and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

For the next several weeks we will be publishing installments of Taking Your Maps to the Next Level – a series of short tutorials meant to enable you, the user, to get more out of MapAList. Each installment will focus on a single feature, show examples of both spreadsheets and maps, and provide step by step instructions to make it work.

Here’s the current plan…

01/02/09 –Basic Grouping to Show Differentiation
01/09/09 – Advanced Grouping to Show Differentiation
01/16/09 – Adding Hyperlinks to Your Map Points
01/23/09 – Adding E-mail & Phone Calls (via Skype) to Your Map Points

01/30/09 – Adding Images & Iframes to your Map Points

If you have other ideas for topics please give us a shout.

--The Map Commissioner (E-mail)