Engineering a New World

When I was working on my last Bing Maps project for Webworld Technologies, my Microsoft rep told me, “…and as soon as you’re ready, let me know and I’ll give you a hack to disable that f’n birds-eye popup”.   I didn’t know that was the official inside term for it, but like so many internal naming conventions that stick with you, I felt it was appropriately named.  I think the Bing bird’s eye view is a fantastic way to visualize maps too, but the little “VIEW THIS IN THE COOL BIRDS EYE VIEW” popup that comes up every time you refresh the map is a bit far into the “annoying UI element” department.

To disable it, just do the following:  right after invoke your map.LoadMap, hide the popup element as follows:

   map.LoadMap(new VELatLong(38.865326, -77.074930), 12 ,’h’ ,false);
                // Suppress popup saying Bird’s Eye available
   document.getElementById("MSVE_obliqueNotification").style.visibility = "hidden";

That will get rid of that popup any time the map loads.

Microsoft’s newly-branded Bing search seems to be getting faster at indexing & displaying relevant blog content. 

Just a month ago, shortly after the Bing launch, I was doing some tests on how fast Bing was indexing content as compared to Yahoo and Google – especially with respect to blogs. 

I put up a number of blog posts on Bing Maps and KML, and then 1-2 days later, began searching around on Google and Bing for more info on Bing Maps KML implementation.  Within about an hour, Google had already indexed my KML blog posts, and had them available in the results, integrated in to the normal SERPs.  Bing, however, had none of my blog posts indexed, and after a week still had none of my posts indexed.  Now, these were posts I also went and threw links to on forums and all over the web, as I was trying to get a specific question answered – so both Google and Bing had spiders all over my site basically hourly.  However, 2 weeks later, I was searching for more info on Bing Maps and KML, and in Google I almost couldn’t get anything but my blog posts – whereas Bing still was not indexing it.  They’re showing now.

Well, now the situation appears to have changed.  I made a post on one of my other blogs about a new Dianetics DVD that came out.    I haven’t really linked this one from anywhere, so I thought it’d be interesting to see how they were showing up. 

Oddly enough, in both Bing and Google, my posts are showing up on the first page of results when searching for “new dianetics dvd”.   Bing was indexing & showing blog post results after only about 10 hours of having been posted.

In any case, I thought it an interesting observation – and one that’s probably going to get me to use Bing more – as when trying to solve programming problems, the answers are commonly on forums and blogs, something that was getting a poor hit rate on Bing but showing relevant results in Google.

In importing KML into a Bing Maps (nee MS Virtual Earth) map, you will run into a limit of how many items or shapes it will allow you to render. 

The reason for this is performance, as it’s generally understood that one will start getting degraded performance as you go up over 200 shapes being put on the map at any one time.  Well, I did indeed experience such in IE8, but not in Safari, Chrome or Firefox – so, many of us may want/need to put more than their default 200 shapes on the screen.

To do this, you use the MaxImportedShapes property of the VEShapeSourceSpecification class (defined here), done something like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
    var map = null;

    function EventMapLoad() {
        var shapeLayer = new VEShapeLayer();
        // var shapeLimit = new VEShapeSourceSpecification.MaxImportedShapes = 500;
        var shapeSpec = new VEShapeSourceSpecification(VEDataType.ImportXML, http://myhost.com/myKmlFile.kml, shapeLayer);
        shapeSpec.MaxImportedShapes = 500;
        map.ImportShapeLayerData(shapeSpec);
    }

    function CreateMap() {
        map = new VEMap(’myMap’);
        map.onLoadMap = EventMapLoad;
        map.LoadMap(null, 3, VEMapStyle.Hybrid);
    }
</script>

This will set the maximum number of shapes to 500.  I haven’t tested with much more than that, so performance will almost certainly be intolerable if you kick that up to 1000 shapes plus. 

I’m in the midst of doing a development project with Bing Maps, using their nifty feature whereby you can create a polygon ‘collection’ in their UI toolset, and then publish this out to a KML file, which you can then import back and overlay back onto the map and be able to display it in all sorts of interesting ways (i.e. in their birdseye mode, 3D Google-earth-style mode, etc.).

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been the smoothest road, and I’m looking to find a support community that can help me through this.

The first hurdle is that you can’t develop on KML using just your own box.  I.e., you can’t host the KML file on your local web server or an internally-located dev server.  In order make KML overlays work in Bing Maps, the KML file has to be on an internet-accessible machine.   This is due to the fact that the sequence works like this – if you want to display a file like “myoverlays.kml” on your map:

1.  You specify the KML overlay as a shape in your Bing Maps code, like so:

function EventMapLoad() {
    var shapeLayer = new VEShapeLayer();
    var shapeSpec = new VEShapeSourceSpecification(VEDataType.ImportXML, http://blog.reevestech.net/wp-content/uploads/arlington-combined.kml, shapeLayer);
    map.ImportShapeLayerData(shapeSpec);
}

This will then load that KML file when the page loads.

2. When the page loads, the Bing Maps JS then grabs your KML file off the server, and sends it back to Bing to be transformed into a “collection” markup that the Bing JS can use.  If you check your Firebug action when loading a KML file as above, you’ll see a request for something like this:

http://www.bing.com/maps/GeoCommunity.aspx?mapguid=1246652212958&action=importcol&saveimport=v&cid=msftve_1001&mapurl=http%3a%2f%2fblog.reevestech.net%3a8600%2faed%2fkml%2farlington-combined.kml&rim=VEMap._GetMapFromGUID(%271246652212958%27)._lm.RetrieveImportedCallback&rimargs=%27msftve_1001%27&mkt=en-us&maxitems=200

Note that it has my URL in the request.   The response you get back from the server is something of a “Collection Markup” or “CML” schema, which is basically the same XML data as the KML, but obviously piped through some XSLT at Bing’s end to make it acceptable for their JS.

3. With that data returned successfully to the client’s browser, the KML should then render on the map area of the user’s machine.

Now, where it gets tricky for me is this: I’m trying to dynamically generate a KML file to be returned when the user goes to the page. 

Now, for some reason – the Bing Maps KML parser seems to work when the data is served off of Apache, and works when served statically by Resin — but not when served dynamically from a Resin/Railo ColdFusion server.   

I can’t tell why this is, but something in the request is making the Bing Maps KML parser bail out.  Below are WGET samples – one where the request is going through Resin statically, the other is where it’s being parsed by the Railo CF servlet.  Same exact file, nothing different.  

Any clues, anyone?

Read more…

I just noticed that Wordpress comments are marked as “rel=external nofollow”.  I got curious as to what that meant for SEO, as a tactic for SEO’s (and for spammers) has commonly been to deluge blogs with comments, hoping to thereby increase link popularity.

The best explanation I’ve found for this is on the Microformats Wiki, which explains the subtle differences between “nofollow”, “external” and the other “rel=” attributes.

In terms of what actual value and/or impact this would then have on the SEO value of comments in blogs, this is another one that’s a bit up to speculation.

One can first-off point out that an “external nofollow” tag would thereby mean that a link is meant to be marked as an external link that should not be followed and cataloged by any search engine.

However, there’s been rumblings all over the net that Yahoo! and Bing don’t give a damn about nofollow links, and index them anyhow.

So, unless you’re in the know and actually work for one of these search giants, chances are you’re going to have to rely on making your decision the old-hat SEO way – by empirical observation – and then determine what the impact really is.

Okay – while not exactly where I wanted to be, I now see that I’m able to easily display a KML feed in Bing Maps (the artist formerly known as Microsoft Virtual Earth) by appending a “mapurl” parameter to maps.bing.com, and then feed it in the URL to your KML file.  Like

http://bing.com/maps?mapurl=[your_kml]

For example, if you click through on the link above, you’ll see the KML file that I generated from my Flickr cross-country set, then superimposed on Bing Maps, with a nicely-formatted sidebar containing all of the other various metadata stored in the KML file.

I’ve still not been able to get their other sample to work, probably due to some sort of mime-type issue, but the above is a pretty nice feature.