GeoCommons on the HuffPost! (and how to embed your map)

Yesterday, the Huffington Post posted a short article on its front page titled “How the Economic Impact of the Oil Spill is Spreading Beyond the Gulf.” This article featured an embed of a map created in GeoCommons showing the BP oil spill, fishery closure boundaries, as well as the cities impacted. The HuffPost plans to update this map with user input to track how communities across the country continue to be impacted. This is an ideal example of how FortiusOne’s GeoCommons can be used to create a map to make it easy for readers to visualize information in an interactive and accessible way. Other online news media have also used GeoCommons to enhance their story. Check out The Toronto Star and The Digital Gazette for some other examples.

Want to embed maps in your own blog? GeoCommons makes it easy to do.

View your map in Maker! and click on the “Details” button in the upper right. In the Map Details window that opens, click on the gray box that says “Embed this map in your website”.

Copy all the text in the box, and paste it directly into your blog post or web page. If you are using a blog tool like WordPress, you will want to copy the code into the HTML tab.

Preview your post, and you should see your map displayed!

By default the map is 400 pixels high. You can modify this default height and width by changing the numbers in the <style> section of the embed code. For example, to set the height to 300 pixels and the width to 500 pixels, modify the values to height: 300px; width: 500px.

Here is the Huffington Post’s map embedded by simply copying and pasting the embed code:

#maker_map_19750 {width: 100%; height: 400px;}

View full map

Maker.maker_host=’http://maker.geocommons.com’;Maker.finder_host=’http://finder.geocommons.com’;Maker.core_host=’http://core.geocommons.com’;
Maker.load_map(“maker_map_19750″, “19750″);

Have you embedded a GeoCommons map in your blog? Share it with us by commenting below!