People have been asking for it for years, and I finally got my finger out and built a map search system:http://www.aditnow.co.uk/map (linked from the 'Mines, Quarries & Sites' drop-down)
Basically it allows searching by country, and then zone (e.g. OS Landranger sheet in UK, state in USA) and by mineral, or any combination.
In the UK results can be plotted on OS maps or Google maps.
International results are plotted on Google maps.
Search can be all mines / sites or limited to those with content (photos, documents, notes).
It's taken me an age to do this because AN is an international site and I needed an international way of plotting things. Historically mines were added with a grid reference and that was only good for the UK.
Some months back I modifed the 'add a mine' admin page to use a whizzy new map system that entered lat/long and (if UK) Landranger grid ref just by dragging the map around. This was the first stage...
Next about 12,000 UK mines without lat/long had to have them calculated from the grid reference. Once this was done every mine had a lat/long (well, about 98% of them anyway) and so could be reliably potted on a map.
Other fixes / improvments:
1, I've also re-written the mines near code on each mine home page. That now uses something called the Great Circle Distance Haversine formula to calculate distance between two lat/long points. So it now works internationally and the old problem with not finding mines on another Landranger sheet is gone.
2, I've also replaced the mine map on the mine home page with the Google API v3 version.
--
Coming up... this is early days for map plotting. I'd like to add (if possible) some form of historical maps (no promises on that, depends what I can overlay and what is permissable).
I'd like to add name and wildcard searching and plotting on the map, searching within a distance of a grid reference or lat/long point. And eventually to allow toggling between the map and list of results. At that stage the old search facility will be removed (but the various methods of listing mines will remain).
--
For now though I hope you find it useful and enjoy using it.
I'll be working on this facility for about another 6 weeks before turning attention to improving other areas of the site.
For the moment I'm off for a lie down in a dark room :lol:
my orders are to sit here and watch the world go by