BlogMap

I was visiting Eko Juniarto's blog and was quite interested in the BlogMap appears on the right panel of the blog. Interesting, we can see the exact physical location of the blogger's residence (not the location of the server hosting the blog, though), and who are other bloggers residing in the same area.

The BlogMap feature is provided by Feedmap, so I went there to have a look and to find out how do I get my own Blogmap. There is a "How Can I..." section however it doesn't actually guide a beginner (like myself) on how to setup and get my own Blogmap.

And then, I stumbled upon this good explanation from Kuan Cheen, a fellow blogger from Malaysia, regarding the step-by-step guide on how to get my own BlogMap. Based on Kuan Cheen's explanation, I can see that there are only 5 simple steps to be done:

1. Get a geo-tag
2. Put the geo-tag on our blog's template
3. Register our geo-tag to BlogMap
4. Get the script to display the BlogMap
5. Insert the script into our blog's template

OK, so first, I need to get a geo-tag for my location. Geo-tag is actually a tag containing the value of our current location's latitude and longitude in decimal degree. Kuan Cheen suggested several sites on how to check the latitude and longitude of certain location, and I chose Multimap. By browsing to the maps provided, I can get the exact latitude and longitude of my location, and prepare the geo-tag as follows:

<meta name="ICBM" content="1.343, 103.7693" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="1.343;103.7693" />

Note that the above is the geo-tag of my location. You should use your own geo-tag if you want to have a BlogMap showing your location.

Next step, I need to put the above geo-tag on my blog's template. I'm using Blogger, so I just need to edit the template and put the two-line tag above under the <$BlogMetaData$> line. I then saved the template and republished the blog. I believe you won't have any issues even though you're not using Blogger, as long as your blog provides option to edit the template.

Once done, I would need to submit my blog to BlogMap. So I went to this BlogMap submit page, put my blog's URL and then clicked "Submit Blog!". Once the blog is registered, I will get the codes on how to show the BlogMap, Neighblogs and the OPML (for Blogrolling) on my blog.

I then inserted all the codes into my blog's template, saved the template and republished the blog again. And you can see the result on the bottom left pane of this page.

It's quite simple, actually. So, why wait? You can try out for yourselves. :)

[Indonesian version]