Show HN: StackMaps - Interactive Maps of StackExchange Communites

by johndbritton • 14 years ago

34 21 14 years ago

I recently discovered the Travel StackExchange site and thought it would be cool to see where my fellow travelers live so I built a map using the StackExchange API. A nice side-effect of the shared API was that my app works for all StackExchange communities.

johns2• 14 years ago

JDB! Why am I not showing up in SF? :)

johndbritton9• 14 years ago

You're probably not in the 500 top users by reputation. Click "show more users" a few times and you'll show up as long as you have your location in your profile.

reustle• 14 years ago

Looks good! It's times like these that make me wish it was more of a standard to use your ZipCode as your location instead of city (and convert to city in the background), so the points on maps like this would be more spread out in cities. Also, you should make the "Choose a StackExchange Site" drop down more prominent since it is a required first step.

johndbritton9• 14 years ago

I don't know how postal codes work internationally and I'd imagine that geocoding them might be a bit easier but not as simple as it could be.

I'm a big fan of giving users a map and letting them drop a pin at a specific zoom level. This lets them be as specific or as fuzzy as they want and it gives the benefit of not needing geocoding.

Will make the choose site more attention grabbing.

asimeqi2• 14 years ago

I like this very much. How did you implement the effect where if there is more than a user at a given point, when you click on that point a bunch of pins open radially from that point? Is that called clustering?

gmac2• 14 years ago

He's used this library of mine: https://github.com/jawj/OverlappingMarkerSpiderfier

It's not quite the same thing as clustering -- there's more info on this in the README.

johndbritton9• 14 years ago

I originally tried to use the MarkerClusterer from Google but that didn't work because at the closest zoom level the pins directly on top of each other weren't clickable.

The Spiderfier is much better suited for this problem (lots of people geocoded with the same city, state, or other location name).

asimeqi2• 14 years ago

That is a great library. I like it that the shadow is darker if more points are overlapping. Thanks for sharing.

chrisbroadfoot2• 14 years ago

Great library, dude. People often ask how to do this, I will definitely be pointing them towards your library.

johndbritton9• 14 years ago

I used an excellent library called OverlappingMarkerSpiderfier. You can find the code on github here:

https://github.com/jawj/OverlappingMarkerSpiderfier

There's also a link in the credits.

guyht• 14 years ago

I think it might need a bit of tweaking http://imgur.com/FBiL5

johndbritton9• 14 years ago

Yeah, that's the Yahoo geocoding service acting up again.

pgrote2• 14 years ago

Odd. If you don't enter a city for New Zealand, the mapping assumes you are in the South Atlantic Ocean. :-)

johndbritton9• 14 years ago

Google has a really low rate limit for geocoding, so I'm using a geocoder from Yahoo. Not much I can do about the quality of the less well defined locations.

pgrote2• 14 years ago

I wonder how Yahoo! got it wrong? It looks like they are good with the latitude. Thanks for the response.

chrisbroadfoot2• 14 years ago

Nice!

One suggestion: when a cluster of markers are clicked, pop out all of the children of the cluster - you can do this by setting the 'zIndex' of the marker.

Also, it would be even better to dim out all of the other markers.

johndbritton9• 14 years ago

Good idea, I'll add this.

Show HN: StackMaps - Interactive Maps of StackExchange Communites

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