Trip Across America

In a world where unlimited information is available at our fingertips, finding interesting places to visit should be easy, but my experience has shown it actually can be quite difficult. I’m continually amazed at the places I stumble upon, which my original research did not uncover. There’s no shortage of blogs and websites providing trip ideas, but it can be pretty difficult to piece it all together. I’ve thought about this problem a fair amount, and I keep coming back to the idea that interactive maps are the answer.

The map above is my first attempt at a solution. It’s fully interactive, and each location marker has a link to the post I’ve written about it. In the case of cities where I’ve written multiple posts, clicking on the dot will reveal multiple links. Those locations are also differentiated by having red dots instead of blue. Maybe I’ll come up with a better system, but for now I think it works. Clicking on a state will also display a zoomed view, so hopefully the map won’t get too crowded, even as the number of posts continue to grow.

I anticipate this will be the first of many iterations, as there’s lots of improvements that can make this more useful. But I wanted to post this initial version to solicit reader feedback. If you’re interested in using such a tool, and have thoughts on how to make it better, please let me know. Any and all suggestions are welcome. Going forward the map will update with every new post, and it will be permanently hosted on it’s own page. Currently that tab is titled “Trip Across America – The Map”, and is accessible from the home page. At some point I’ll invest some time in coming up with a catchier title, but for now it gets the job done.

Hopefully this makes it easy to utilize what I’ve written so far. But like I said, if you have ideas on how this can be more helpful, do not hesitate to comment.