

Show HN: StackMaps - Interactive Maps of StackExchange Communites - johndbritton
http://johndbritton.com/stackmaps

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johndbritton
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.

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

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johndbritton
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.

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johns
Wow didn't realize I had fallen so far in the rankings. Thanks for ruining my
day ;)

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johndbritton
bummer, better get to it.

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reustle
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.

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johndbritton
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.

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chrisbroadfoot
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.

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johndbritton
Good idea, I'll add this.

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asimeqi
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?

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gmac
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.

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

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gmac
The shadow darkness is a happy by-product of the markers' semi-transparency.
You're welcome!

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

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

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

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johndbritton
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.

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

