How to add a BlogMap to your blog

Related link: http://www.feedmap.net/BlogMap/

I recently started seeing blogmaps showing up on people's blogs, and immediately I liked this concept. It's fun being able to see the location of the bloggers around you.

BlogMap is essentially a directory of blogs based on the URL of the blog and the longitude and latitude of your location. To add your blog, the best way to do it is to add the longitude and latitude in a meta tag in your header. There is a way to initially add a blog using your address, but it's not possible to update the location of your blog this way. Also, note that it's currently not possible to remove a blog from the directory once added through the interface (although an email to the site manager will probably do the trick).

Also, note that BlogMap only works with feeds, not webpages. So if you try to add the geo location to a regular web page and submit that, it won't work.

First, you'll need to find the longitude and latitude of your location. A great online resource for this is Terra-Server USA. Type in your address in the form on the left and click Go. If it works, it will match your location and give you a choice of images. Click on the Arial Photo Image (if available), and you'll see your location and hopefully, the longitude and latitude of this location will be filled in for you on the left panel, underneath where you typed your address.

You can click on Info above the image to see the longitude and latitude of the quadrants around your area, and to find the latitude and longitude of locations that do not have an address.

Now, to create a map for your own blog, edit the template that generates your blog feed and add the following meta tag to the header:

<meta name="geo.position" content="[latitude];[longitude]">

Save your template and republish your blog. Now you can submit your blog to BlogMap here. Once, you've submitted your blog, you can now add your blog map to your blog with the following HTML/Javascript; again, edit your template to add this code to your blog:

<div><script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.feedmap.net/blogmap/blogapi.ashx?method=blogmapbadge&feed=http://[URL of your feed here]"></script></div>

BlogMap will generate the correct code for you to add to your webpage, so you can just cut and paste from the site after submitting your blog.