NYC Pizza Map

Posted by Adam Kuban, August 22, 2005 at 12:30 AM

Slice is proud to bring you a new pizza-finding technology. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the Slice Pizza Map, powered by Google Maps.

So far, we've pinpointed every New York City pizzeria Slice has reviewed. They are marked with a Slice icon. Click the slice, and a bubble pops up showing you which pizzeria the icon represents (see example at right). Click on the pizzeria's name to read our review.

For those of you unfamiliar with Google Maps, you can use the controls in the upper left-hand corner to zoom in and out and pan left, right, up, and down. You can also navigate around the map by dragging it with your mouse: Click and hold anywhere on the map, and drag it as you please.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Macintosh: At this time, the map works only in Mozilla's Firefox browser. Sorry, it doesn't seem to work in Safari. And don't even bother if you're still using OS9.
PC: Slice is built on a Mac. We rarely have PC access. Over the weekend, however, I tried the Slice Pizza Map on a PC, using some version or other of Internet Explorer. It worked.

GEEK STUFF
For those of you interested in creating a Google Maps mashup of your own, a good place to get background material and research what's already out there is the Google Maps Mania blog.

You'll also need to get a Google Maps API key, which allows you to embed the technology into your site. If you know your stuff, the documentation on the Google site can get you started. I don't really know my stuff, but I was able to hack this map out using the tutorial at xml.com: Hacking Maps with the Google Maps API.

HELP, I NEED SOMEBODY!
If any of you are GMaps hack wizards and you know a simple solution to our Safari problem, feel free to drop me a line: adam (at) sliceny (dot) com. Or, if you want to take a look at the source code—in addition to the Maps page coding, we use an XML document to pass info into the map. It is located at http://www.sliceny.com/maps/pizzerias.xml. Additionally, our XSL document can be found here: http://www.sliceny.com/maps/pizzerias.xsl.

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