Google Maps recently opened up their My Maps program which allows you to plot your own points of interests and way points along the way. What’s really great about this feature is that you have the power of Google Local and just by searching you can locate restaurants, attractions, parks and then add them to your custom map. Points of interest can be personalized with one of the built-in icons or you can upload your own.

My Maps is especially great when you are traveling with others because of the sharing options enable you to invite others to help edit your map together.

This weekend my fiance and I are traveling to Phoenix. She’s the foodie, I’m the sightseer. She was able to plot all of the places to eat and I mapped what we would be doing. Here’s our results:

Building the map is easy. Just visit maps.google.com and click on the My Maps feature. You need to set our map as public to enable the sharing features. Google has created a great video to demonstrate the step-by-step process of using the mapping tools.

What really sets this above the rest though are the mobile capabilities. With every map created Google automatically generates a KML file enabling you to embed the map into your website or load the points into Google Earth. But KML files can also be loaded into the iPhone. To load your map open the Google Maps application on your iPhone and in the search box, enter the URL to your KML file.

For testing purposes you can view our Phoenix map by entering “http://tinyurl.com/iphonemaptest” (without quotes) into your search box. I shortened the URL using TinyURL to make it easier to type. Google Maps brings up all of your points of interest and you can click on each pin and get directions to each of the locations from your current. And with the GPS you can see what’s around you to be sure you don’t miss a single thing.

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I’ve included a code snippet that makes this easy and some examples of how you can use the data once passed.

First, you need to add the variable array function to the top of your page. This block should be above where you are trying to insert the code (typically the head tag is the best place)

<script type="text/javascript"><!-- 
    function getQueryVariable(variable) {
      var query = window.location.search.substring(1);
      var vars = query.split("&");
      for (var i=0;i<vars.length;i++) {
        var pair = vars[i].split("=");
        if (pair[0] == variable) {
          return pair[1];
        }
      }
    }
     // --></script>

Now once you have the function in place you can call any variable from your URL string. In this case we will use the variable “x” where the URL string would look something like… www.yoursite.com/index.php?x=Hello

In the first example we will just write the data directly to the page:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
 
      document( getQueryVariable("x") );  
// --></script>

You can also have the variable populate a field value in a form. In the case below you would need to provide the formname and fieldname that you would like to update:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
 
      document.formname.fieldname.value =  getQueryVariable("x");  
// --></script>

In this last example we demonstrate how you can use the query string to do simple math equations. In this example we pass the most recent gift (MRG) through the URL string and it calculates suggested donations levels from the MRG. If MRG is left blank we auto populate the donation field with default values:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
 
var level1 = getQueryVariable("mrg") /2 ;
var level2 = getQueryVariable("mrg");
var level3 = getQueryVariable("mrg") *2 ;
var level4 = getQueryVariable("mrg") * 4;
 
if(level1=="") {
 
	level1 = "25";
	}
 
if(level2=="") {
 
	level2 = "50";
	}
 
if(level3=="") {
 
	level3 = "100";
	}
 
if(level4=="") {
 
	level4 = "250";
	}
// --></script>

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I have however found Twitter to be a useful tool for sharing found news and items with others. And while there are many twitter clients out there from a slew of Adobe Air clients (my current favorite is Spaz) to mobile applications on iPhones, Blackberries and GPhones. There exists a better way to share the latest news with friends.

Twitter Feed is a small up-start service that runs off donations and allows you to take any RSS feed and mash the data into your Twitter feed. I use the Google Reader service and publicly publish my stared items. Then as I read through all of the daily news in Reader I can just click on the star icon and the article is automatically published to my followers network.

Similarly I have setup other RSS feeds to plug into my Twitter stream including: YouTube favorites, Digg posts, and Brightkite.

Twitter can also be helpful in updating your Facebook status. By installing the Twitter application on Facebook my profile status can stay in sync with my Twitter feed.

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What’s really pretty cool is that it can also sync profile photos which makes it really easy to add photos to all of my contacts on my iPhone.

Check out the program by clicking here to download.

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