Add Virtual Earth maps to your website

Posted on March 15, 2009 at 5:29 am

Previously, I wrote about how you can easily add Google Maps directions to your website, but not everyone likes Google Maps. Virtual Earth is Microsoft’s product to the online mapping and geospatial market.  It competes with Google Maps and and the open source Marble. 

Many websites are using this for mapping capabilities like www.Toyota.com that used it for locating Toyota service centers.  

image

On this article we will talk about how to add a Virtual Earth map to your blogs using Windows Live Writer. Get the software from http://download.live.com/writer. 

If you have the 2008 or older version, please get the newer one as it is more stable and powerful in terms o functionality than the old one.

On the blog editor window click the “Map” under the “Insert” panel.

image

Enter the address on “Find Location”, click the spyglass button to see the preview of the map.

image

If you want an aerial view instead of a road map, just pick aerial on the dropdown:

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You can also choose the bird’s eye view to see a more detailed imagery of the location:

image

Below is the actual output of the map generated from the steps above:

Map picture

The generated source code is a little tricky to do by hand because it doesn’t have the address you used to generate the map.  I think it uses geographic coordinates instead of an address. 

<div class=”wlWriterEditableSmartContent”
id=”scid:84E294D0-71C9-4bd0-A0FE-95764E0368D9:382befa0-97f6-4d2d-a02a-241114086b22″>
<a href=http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?[shortened]id=”map-15319696-2c62-4c8e-bdbf-84311d152401″>
<img src=”$map-083c2a350de6.jpg” width=”415″ height=”313″ alt=”Map picture”></a>
</div>

For showing maps and directions, the Virtual Earth map is an easy to use add-on in Windows Live Writer. 

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Add Virtual Earth maps to your website”

  1. pc tips online said on : March 15th, 2009 at 7:07 pm

    Thank you for sharing such a tip. I have used the winows live writer for a long time but I always ignore this function. It is very cool


  2. Pratik said on : April 14th, 2009 at 11:01 am

    Hello friends,
    I am using dial up connection. I tried this function many times but the Virtual Earth map does not show, only a white screen appears. What can I do ?


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