The Gmaps “Pedometer” has a relatively new (2006-01-28) feature, server-side permalinks for routes. I saved my “extended” commute route to see how this worked, and it looks pretty good. The server-side permalink takes care of a limitation on TinyURL length, which hasn’t been a problem for me yet.
But the feature which really got my attention today was the elevation display–very cool! For example, check out this route near Markleeville, California. (The elevation profile should show up as a blue graph below the map. If it’s not visible, find the “Elevation:” setting in the control box and select the “large” link.) You can see that this route starts at about 5065′ then climbs steadily to about 5765′ with a relatively steep descent over the last mile. This is great info for planning a route, especially in an area you are unfamiliar with.
NB: other Google map posts on this blog are tagged google+map.
After I completed the registration process for Google sitemaps, I checked my sitemap status and found an extra benefit of this whole rigamarole. From your “My Sitemaps” page, follow the stats link next to one of your submitted URI’s. If the page shows
URLs found during our regular crawl process
this indicates broken links into your site, not in your sitemap. If you can find the offending link on your own site, go ahead and fix it. If it’s a link from another site, see if you can get the webmaster of that site to fix it, (assuming you can find the source of the link). In either case, it’d probably be a good idea to put a Permanent Redirect (301) on your own site to correct anybody who’s chasing the broken link.
Vanessa Fox from Google engineering discusses the new site statistics a tiny bit, but more information is available in the google-sitemaps Google group. I’ve already left a comment there that I think there are two important pieces of information missing from the new site statistics:
- The time that the broken URL was last crawled.
- One or more URL’s pointing to source of the broken link.
Another feature that would be very helpful would be some way to alert Google that a broken URL has been repaired, e.g. via a 301 redirect.
I stopped by Joseph’s blog a few days ago and read the article about Vint Cerf moving to Google. This got me thinking about an earlier Google-related post about sitemaps on Joseph’s blog, where he wondered about a WordPress plugin to generate Google sitemaps. I figured that the WordPress community had probably finished with this by now, and it seems that they have. This article discusses the development of several such plugins and their features. If you check this link, you can peruse a menu of sitemap plugins.
I chose Arne Brachhold’s sitemap generator plugin. As usual with WordPress, installation was simple. I had two minor problems (see below), both covered by the FAQ section on the sitemap plugin page.
I downloaded the plugin to my WordPress’ wp-content/plugins directory, then activated it from the Plugins admin page, http://your.blog/url/wp-admin/plugins.php. Next I went to Options/Sitemap and adjusted the options to suit my blog, then clicked “Rebuild Sitemap” and ran into problem #1–I had forgotten to make sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz writable. Easy to fix, see the FAQ section on the sitemap plugin page. Once I took care of this, I successfully built my first sitemap file, but got a “Could not ping to Google” error, also addressed in the FAQ section (although not in the plugin sourcefile). I clicked on the URL after the “Could not ping to Google” error, which basically told me that I needed a Google account. (Yet another password to keep track of, sigh…) So, create Google account, wait for email address verification, then manually cut-and-paste the sitemap URL into the Google account manager. Am I finished yet? No! Google now wants me to prove that I have access to the sitemap’s directory by creating a particular Google-supplied filename. I’m starting to wonder if Google sitemaps are worth the hassle, but I’ve come this far and hopefully this is the final step. touch GOOGLE0123456789abcdef.html, click “Verify” on the Google’s “My Sitemaps” page, and a nice green VERIFIED message comes up. Then I went back to my WordPress Options/Sitemap page and tried “Rebuild Sitemap”:
Successfully pinged Google at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://my.blog/url/sitemap.xml.gz
Woo hoo, success! I’d better alert my web hosting company so that they aren’t blindsided by the sudden bandwidth spike. 
My wife was trying to find gymnastic competition scores for some of the past seasons, so I whipped up this Google query for her:
site:norcal-gymnastics.org “meet results” 2003 firstname lastname
No big deal, but she’s going to need to do these types of queries quite a bit. Having this here will save her a lot of time.
This works very well for 2003, but NorCal Gymnastics is currently tweaking the 2004 files which is making it difficult to find last year’s results. The 2005 season has only recently begun, so there aren’t many results available yet. And obviously since I’m querying NorCal Gymnastics, it will only return results from Northern California. If you’re in another region, you’re on your own!
This is so cool! A Google-powered pedometer (or, in my case, a bike-o-meter). I can’t believe Joseph hasn’t blogged this already, since he’s the one who told me about this.
Once you’ve arrived at the pedometer site, choose your country (if outside the US), state, and type in your city. As on the original Google Map site you can scroll around the map and zoom in/out to focus on the area that you’ll be riding (walking, running, whatever). The app can not only save a route that you’ve mapped, it can also create a TinyURL at the same time. I used this to map the route I ride between work and home.
This app is great, but the site is made even better by the “Acknowledgements and references” section. (Scroll down below the map, the section is on the left side with all the other text.) The links to all the enabling technologies and resources are awesome!
The only problem I’ve seen so far is printing. Clicking the “Print map” link is supposed to reformat the map for printing, but on my browser it opens up the print dialog. I have to cancel the print dialog to view the reformatted map. I’m using Firefox 1.0.1 on a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X Panther v10.3.9. It’s an easy enough workaround, and until I get around to updating Firefox I’m not going to report this as a bug.
