I’ve added a new site to the findless.co.uk family, which brings a completely new perspective to English and Scottish premier league football news. Specifically, the vertical perspective. ๐
I’ve been meaning to put together a Google Maps mashup for some time, and having worked out how to import and process RSS feeds for the health and safety and education search engines,ย it seemed like a good idea to mash these into the mix as well. The result is a map showing pointers for every top-flight soccer stadium in England and Scotland, as close to the pitch’s centre spot as I could manage. Click on the pointer, and you get some basic club information. Plus – and this is the clever bit – the latest news for that particular club, sourced from the BBC’s RSS feeds.
It’s all stored in a database, so theoretically it should be easy enough to pump the same information into a different mapping service. Time permitting (and it’s not likely), I might try to send the data to Microsoft’s equivalent service, as their UK satellite photos are much better.
For anyone technically minded, the feeds are pulled in using Ajax, to minimise the load time of the page, and the impact on both servers. It’s the first time I’ve done any Ajax programming, and I’m feeling quite proud of myself. ๐