Is it some infomercial ? -_-
there are other mapping services using click and drag (mappy.com, don’t know what countries are covered)
google didn’t invent blogging, there are other free blogging websites,

and so on.

What a strange entry…

Well it’s true that blogger has been around for a while. But you’re not exactly saying it’s a new service so I don’t know what hjkhj is talking about. I used it extensively a few years ago well before it was bought by google.

And regarding google maps, they still know where to find the miserable failure in washington dc. 😉

Yeah, I’m not sure what hjkhj’s talking about, either–I went to mappy.com (it covers only European countries) and they most definitely do not have live dragging–in fact, the interface is even inferior to Yahoo’s. hjkhj, I don’t think you fully understand what I meant by “click-and-drag,” especially if you thought it applied to mappy.com. As for the blogs, I didn’t claim that Blogger was the only such service out there–but it is certainly one of if not the most popular, and has features the others don’t have. And so on.

The post was meant to introduce some pretty good services all under the Google banner because I thought they were pretty good services, and that others could get something out of them too. hjkhj, before you post (and please avoid double-posting, I’m deleting the duplicate), please go and look to see what you’re talking about first. Thanks.

bahh! my links not working. Looks like a link, smells and tastes like a link, but brother that ain’t no link. The “href=” seems to be missing.

Mark: It’s working now. You had put a hyphen instead of an equal sign after the HREF attribute.

Of course. I knew that, just testing you.

Yes! Loud cheers for gmail’s POP access.

I’ve been carrying around a yahoo.com address since about 1997 – it’s my one and only e-mail address – and it really frustrated me when Yahoo made it a paid-users-only feature. A colleague gave me a gmail invitation a few weeks ago and I’m now using it for some of my high-bandwidth Yahoo Group subscriptions, popping them down my lowly 56Kbit modem without needing me to point and lick for each message and *wait* precious time between each message.

I wish Yahoo would bring back POP access, or allow forwarding, for mortals.

Brad

clicking and dragging works perfectly. sorry for you.

Ah. Figured it out. It requires Flash to operate. Frankly, I regard Flash as being way more trouble than it’s worth. It slows the browser on open, requires a wait of up to tens of seconds to load any one animation, and 98% of the Flash material out there is nothing more than advertisements that jump, jiggle, wave and flash so as to drive you to literal distraction. Kind of like animated GIFs–cute or cool at first, but then they annoy the hell out of you. With Flash on, I can’t read half the pages I go to for all the movement everywhere on the screen. No thank you. I have Flash disabled on my main computer, and for good reason. I drop the Flash files back into the proper folder when I need to turn it on–which is rarely–but usually I keep them in cold storage, and my the quality of my web viewing is vastly improved.

Remember back at the beginning of the web when the “coolest” HTML tag was “BLINK”? People used it all the time, as it was the only way to get movement on the screen–and everyone quickly tired of it as being lame and annoying–which is why no one uses it anymore. Then came animated GIFs, still in wide use, but just as annoying for their ubiquity. Fortunately, most browsers allow you to turn them off (which is why I still don’t use Safari, it lacks that feature), so you can avoid most of the annoyance. But then came Flash, and now Flash ads are everywhere since the advertisers are wise to the browser feature that turns of animated GIFs (and Flash is usually difficult or impossible to switch on and off within the browser).

But it all comes down to the same thing: getting movement onto the screen to catch your attention, like waving a shiny object in front of your nose. Granted, Flash has other applications, but they are almost never used. Outside of ads, usually it’s employed to “sex up” a site, to make it look cool–which is the same idiotic, base motivation that made people use the BLINK command so long ago. Good web designers know that a web page has to be elegant without flashing lights; unnecessary movement is what a poor designer uses to cover up a poor design.

Which is one of the reasons the Google map page has a big advantage–it doesn’t depend on Flash, and as such is more universal, not to mention usable without turning your browser into a flashing, moving billboard. The other advantage of Google Maps is the fact that the area of the map display is larger. Smaller points include quicker redraws and better image quality on click-and-drag.

But mappy.com is click-and-draggable, I’ll give you that. Nevertheless, I am far less impressed.

Sorry for me! 😀

By the way, a few other cool things about Google Maps: first, the map area is scalable–that is, if your window is bigger, so is your map area, and it scales automatically. On a large screen, that means a huge map. Second, if you double-click on a point on the map, it recenters the map to that point (by sliding the image, not redrawing). Plus and minus keys zoom in and out as well as the slider bar. The graphics are also superior, with the location tags/note balloons and shadowing, etc. A tour displays the features.

Even though Google Maps is a Beta page and will have added features in the future, it still beats the living crap out of Mappy in its present form.

since when did javascript become the pinnacle of universality…

Compared to Flash? Since it’s far more configurable and powerful than Flash. Also, Flash you often even have to download as a plug-in. Javascript comes with every browser I’ve seen.

Heh … Luis, you complain about how Flash slows down web pages for essentially trite reasons – and I agree, I’m a ‘keep it neat and simple’ man myself – but I find your comment just a bit ironic, given that your Blog page takes 3-4 times longer to load any any of the other blogs I track, because of all those icons in your Link Board I think. Lots of image fetching before everything stops moving and settles down.

Luckily I read your blog at work and not via my 56Kb modem at home!

Brad

Good point–I should really turn that into an image map. Problem is, that’ll make it a lot tougher to update, and I’ll have to mess with the coordinates in the coding… Yargh… but it is true they slow things down.

Maybe during vacation….