RinkAtlas.com is a new Google Maps mashup
that I've been building over the past few
weeks. [ Image: RinkAtlas.com ]

A few Operation Gadget readers have been asking why I'm not writing as much about The Tour de France as I have in past years. The reason is that I'm building a new Google Maps mashup called RinkAtlas.com, and this is taking up a lot of time.

RinkAtlas will eventually provide door-to-door directions to all of the ice rinks in North America. Right now it has information about all of the rinks in New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.

I built RinkAtlas because I go to a lot of ice rinks and there wasn't a single website that provided door-to-door directions. There are a couple of older-technology websites that provide less specific directions, like "from PA Route 309, take exit 35...", but I had trouble using them when I moved to Pennsylvania last year. I didn't know the roads that were more than 20 minutes away from New Jersey. What I would do is go to one of these sites, find the street address, then go to Google Maps and get directions from my house. After doing this a couple of times I said, "There has to be a better way."

It takes a while to enter rinks into the RinkAtlas database because I'm looking at the satellite image produced from each rink's street address to make sure that there's a hockey rink-sized building down there. I'm finding errors in other websites this way. I also found that a lot of rinks don't have street addresses, so I need to look at other information sources in order to find their exact locations. An example of this is Baker Rink on the campus of Princeton University.

One of the cool parts of building RinkAtlas is that I needed to learn to do AJAX programming so I could reposition the pointer that the geocoder put on the map for the street address to the exact location of the rink. I got some ideas for how to do this from Google Maps Hacks, but that book is a little out of date since Google revised their Google Maps API a month or two ago.

I hope you'll give RinkAtlas.com a try, and that you'll come back often if you need directions to ice rinks the way I do. Let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: mashup, Google Maps, ice rink directions.