Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Posted: 15 Mar 2009 03:29 AM PDT

Previously, I wrote about how you can easily add Google Maps directions to your website, but not everyone likes Google Maps. Virtual Earth is Microsoft's product to the online mapping and geospatial market. It competes with Google Maps and and the open source Marble.

Many websites are using this for mapping capabilities like www.Toyota.com that used it for locating Toyota service centers.

On this article we will talk about how to add a Virtual Earth map to your blogs using Windows Live Writer. Get the software from http://download.live.com/writer.

If you have the 2008 or older version, please get the newer one as it is more stable and powerful in terms o functionality than the old one.

On the blog editor window click the "Map" under the "Insert" panel.

Enter the address on "Find Location", click the spyglass button to see the preview of the map.

If you want an aerial view instead of a road map, just pick aerial on the dropdown:

You can also choose the bird's eye view to see a more detailed imagery of the location:

Below is the actual output of the map generated from the steps above:

The generated source code is a little tricky to do by hand because it doesn't have the address you used to generate the map. I think it uses geographic coordinates instead of an address.

<div class=”wlWriterEditableSmartContent”
id=”scid:84E294D0-71C9-4bd0-A0FE-95764E0368D9:382befa0-97f6-4d2d-a02a-241114086b22″>
<a href=http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?[shortened]id=”map-15319696-2c62-4c8e-bdbf-84311d152401″>
<img src=”$map-083c2a350de6.jpg” width=”415″ height=”313″ alt=”Map picture”></a>
</div>