Here’s a map and photo of the Smith Memorial Playground, where I went with my family today. The playground has been around for a long time– over 100 years in fact– and was just rebuilt this summer. It’s a unique playground– the equipment is unusual and interesting, there’s a giant wooden slide, and most interestingly, there’s a large mansion that was built solely as a playhouse for the children of Philadelphia (it was never a residence). My favorite room of the mansion was “Smithville” in the basement, a room full of toy cars, with traffic lights, parking spots, parking meters, and gas pumps. Watching a bunch of five-year-olds in this room was a lot of fun.
My father says he took me to this playground when I was a small child, but I don’t remember. My kids had a fantastic time there today.
The playground is in Fairmount Park, but it seems that it is not run by the city– a nonprofit group maintains it.
So, I just spent far too much time fooling with the Google Maps API when I should have been doing other things. Google has the best maps on the web, but their API has one crippling feature– every API key they issue can only be used in one particular URL directory. That means I can’t get an API key for chaplin-loebell.com, I have to get one for www.chaplin-loebell.com/david — and if I do that, the maps won’t work in any other subdirectory, so permalinks, archives, etc. will no longer show the map. I ended up getting a key for one subdirectory and doing some messing around in there. Then I can include the map in my blog post using an iframe.
I looked at the Yahoo API also, but they actually pretty much insist on hosting the entire map for you– Yahoo branding and all. You can put that in an iframe also, but it seems like it would be uglier for inclusion in a blog. Sorry, Jeffrey, I think I’ll go with Brand X.
What I ultimately want to do is create a series of blog posts with geocoding– where the post is about a specific place. Then, on a seperate page of the site, I’ll display a map (or maps) showing those posts and be able to take a bit of a geographic tour… it sounds like a cool idea, anyway.
Well, in typical fashion, I started this blog and then disappeared for a couple of months.
I’m not sure if anyone is reading this yet, but if so, hi. (Could you leave a comment so I know whether I’m talking to the wall or not?)
I do have a few entries on various topics partially-written. This summer has been the busiest one in recent memory, and it hasn’t been a great time for finishing anything other than work.
What have I been working on? Well, John Smith and I did another site for the Live Arts and Fringe festivals. I think this year’s site is the best ever– we rebuilt the “My Festivals” page into something that’s a true planning tool, and we implemented a great “Tell a Friend” feature. I’ve also been helping the William Penn Charter School set up their new network infrastructure– more on that in a future entry– and doing some work on a database of new plays for the National New Play Network. Not to mention working on a new release of tlavideo.com, to be launched September 8.
As the summer draws to a close, I’m looking forward to having Clara start kindergarten at Project Learn in September… we’re excited for her, and excited to be part of the Project Learn community.
More to come, in less than two months, I hope.
