You all know google and its wonderful GoogleMaps. There are many really cool things you can do with it; just visit google maps and check out the custom map overlays people are doing. However, if you want to embed a certain google map (one of your “my maps”) — you are out of luck, big time.
I stumbled across (or better, read about it shortly after we started the Tango 2.0 googlegroup) Peter Forret’s post on a web tool to embed google maps or also kml’s hosted, e.g. at maps.google.com. However, not all was well at that point, since the embedded map wasn’t centered where I wanted it to be centered. And that makes it a bit useless (I suspect some stupidity on my side or sluggish coding on Peter’s side for this). However, as this is the blogosphere, one of the comments was very cool and helpful: there is another web tool out there for embedding a kml on another website: http://www.dr2ooo.com/tools/maps/. Great, and much more versatile than Peter’s — another reason why the web is cool, as well as proof of the fact that the wheel does indeed get re-invented often. But nowadays you find out more easily about it. 
All was well. (don’t want to spoiler anyone, but those three words are the end of the Harry Potter Saga. Yep, and watch out for a very special effecty last movie, the book just stinks of it.) Check out the current version of my embedded google map on http://www.rhein-neckar-tango.de/milonga-karte. Nice enough, or is it?
Back to Tango 2.0: another member of the group, Peter Eyckerman, who has a great web 2.0 tango web page for Belgium.
And I realized: there is much more you can do with google maps than just embed. And, this being the web, I could just copy what he did — or do it myself.
DIY it is, then. 
The next post will talk about some of the details, detours and results!
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