Collaborative Mapping with WPGeo

WPGeo is one of the most pow­er­ful plu­g­ins installed in the word­press blog­ging sys­tem at blogs.princeton.edu and one with great poten­tial for teach­ing. In its sim­plest form, the plu­gin allows one to asso­ciate loca­tion infor­ma­tion with blog posts by drag­ging and drop­ping a marker on a map. The plu­gin also allows to gen­er­ate a cumu­la­tive map show­ing all the loca­tions asso­ci­ated with posts on the site with links back to those blog posts.  The cumu­la­tive map can be used a nav­i­ga­tional ele­ment, allow­ing the vis­i­tor to dis­cover posts based on loca­tion rather than just by title or by the date on which it was pub­lished. Blogs are a great research tool for col­lab­o­ra­tively cre­at­ing an archive of mate­ri­als. When deal­ing with infor­ma­tion that is asso­ci­ated with loca­tion, this tool allows you to eas­ily record the loca­tion infor­ma­tion, but also to gen­er­ate maps and export map data for use in other appli­ca­tions such as Google Earth.

To get started using the plu­gin, you must first have a blog on Word­Press ser­vice.  You can request a blog at http://blogs.princeton.edu/request/ or, for course blogs, by con­tact­ing the ETC at After you have a blog, a few things must be done before you can begin inserting maps into your posts. The first thing you must do is sign up for a Google Maps key.  This key is a string of number and letters that allows you to insert Google Maps into  your website.  The key does not cost anything, you simply provide Google with the URL, or web address, of your website and a key is generated.  This key should then be enetered into the WPGeo plugin settings.

• Sign up for a Google Maps key at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html
• Return to the dash­board of your blog and click on Plu­g­ins in the left hand menu. Click set­tings just below WP Geo in the list of plugins.
• Paste the Google Maps key in the field at the top of the set­tings page.

After the plu­gin has been acti­vated and you have entered your API ‘key’, you will find a Google map near the bot­tom of the page when you cre­ate a post. Click in the map to add a marker and then drag the marker to the loca­tion asso­ci­ated with that post.  The map will then be dis­played on the blog.  You can cus­tomize the dis­play of the maps by going to the set­tings page for WP-Geo in the left hand menu under ‘Settings’.