I’ve fixed a few bugs and added data to support more community pages.

We now have basic community information and active and sold listing maps in place for:

• Sacramento County
• El Dorado County
• Placer County

There’s still a long way to go on the bug fixing and improving the look of the pages.  I was learning how to do map mash ups at the time, and at the same time sometimes being too clever with the fonts, so it’s none too pretty, but I can clean that as we go.

When shopping for houses in Sacramento as a first-time buyer, which zip code is preferred?

I got a call from a potential buyer the other day wanting to look at houses that she had picked from the MLS herself (I love it when buyers are involved in the process from the start and don’t wait for Realtors® to do the research) and the two themes I saw repeating were 95608 and 95821. Personally, I like 95821 because there are some pretty great deals out there for first-time buyers. But my client has never lived in Sacramento, so I want to really make her feel at home. Any ideas?

One of the maps I’d like to put together here is a Sacramento blog map.

There are quite a few good blogs out there in Sac. I have a short list of them on my blog roll at the Sacramento Real Estate Blog, but I’m sure I could come up with several more great ones with a little research. I just bumped into this awesome Sacramento Food Blog, Sacatomato, for example.

One service I’d like to offer to the local blogging community is not just to create a map of the blogs, though that’s interesting in itself, but to perhaps develop over time one of more maps of points of interest that bloggers suggest. Sacatomato might want to work on a restaurant map, for example. Or I might work with Walk Sacramento or the Sacramento Walking Sticks to put together either waking maps or maps to starting points for walks that others are sponsoring.

The more I look at the possibilities for creating maps for the Sacramento County region, the more it appears to me that the real ultimate goal of this project goes way beyond the real estate maps that the site began with (and that I’m continuing to develop).

Google Earth image shows a pilot’s eye view of the Cameron Park Airport (someone else’s kmz file).

Well, that’s more or less a pilot’s eye view. Your real pilot sort of fellow, who hangs out at the coffee shop (kmz file), would probably tell you that with this sort of setup I’d likely fly off the end of the runway or something.

They’d probably have a better word for setup to like “approach” or some sort of pilotese.

I’m just starting to mess around with Google Earth.

What sort of map blogger would I be if I didn’t mess around with Google Earth?

If you need to find the middle of the airport, it’s more or less at 38.683902 -120.987506. That of course, newly minted map geeks like me, is latitude and longitude, respectively.

By the way, if you copy and paste 38.683902 -120.987506 into Google’s search box, it thinks you want to use the calculator, but clicking on the maps link straigtens it out quite nicely, and you end up in the right place. Yahoo pretty much gets puzzled, but clicking on Yahoo maps and then running it works fine.

Good old Microsoft, God bless them. When you try this query in Live Search, you end up in North Dakota.

I don’t need to speak pilot to understand that condition: lost.

Windows is no way to run a planet.

Map of the Week this week goes to Sacramento County’s “Cities in the County” map, which has links to the city government information in each case, as well as links to the city maps themselves. Can you name the seven cities?

Well, sure, if you look at the map you can.

What’s our mnemonic device, students?

“Can Everyone Find Good Ideas Regarding Sacramento?”

Citrus Heights

Elk Grove

Folsom

Galt

Islton

Rancho Cordova

Sacramento

I wonder how the folks in Isleton feel about being quaint?

This evening I happened across Dan Catt’s awesome Geobloggers Blog. Dan is a Flickr developer working on Flickr’s Geotagging feature.

Of course, in the know sort of guy that I am, the first words that popped into my brain were: “Flickr has Geotagging Feature? Really? What’s up with that?”

After poking around Dan’s Blog and my pathetically picture-sparse Flickr account (I have a map blog, not a photo blog, and now you see why), I found some really fun stuff.

First, it’s very easy to geotag your photos once they’re in Flickr. You can probably figure it out when you see the big old “Map” tag, but in case you can’t, no worries. Flickr put together a tutorial on how to do it.

Of course Flickr being a Yahoo company guess whose API they’re using? Did you say Yahoo? See, like me, then, you’re smarter than a fifth grader.

So tagging your photos is pretty straightforward. Once tagged, there are lots of neat ways to get at them. For example, users or mashups or whomever can subscribe to the RSS feed for a particular Geotagged area. Dan shows you how.

Here’s the RSS Feed for Sacramento Flickr Photos, for example.

Naturally being a Flickr power-user with an awesome seven photos in there of our listing in Folsom, the first thing I had to try was geotagging them and seeing if they showed up in Folsom’s Flickr Photo RSS Feed. Sure enough, there they are. (Well, as of now they are — you know how it is with feeds).

Hey, Athol Kay is a photo-savvy kind of guy. He should know about this. He probably has more than seven photos in Flickr. If not, make sure to razz him.