Recently I wanted to create a google map showing the locations of the zeta nu alumni. I have most of the addresses in a mysql database but I was having an annoying time hooking the database lookups to the javascript for the maps. Rather than think to hard I used standard php with mysql and Phoogle Maps to create an populate the map. This worked fine but it was crazy slow.

The issue was gecoding, converting the real world addresses to the long/lat positions on that google maps requires. This was fairly easy to get around, basically I wrote another php script to geocode the addresses and insert them into the database as well. Now the mapping goes much faster, yadda yadda. For posterity here is the actual map. It’s generated on the fly, geocoding new addresses as needed, although the zoom isn’t quite right.