testing... 1, 2, 3...

as you've probably read from my previous post, the map i used to have at the top of my blog page ceased to exist once the company that hosted it, platial.com, closed shop. here's a blog post by portland-based silicon florist that talks about the promising beginnings of platial, then how it finally was forced to close down: End of the road: Platial draws its social mapping pursuits to a close

thankfully, the nice people at platial made sure that all of their customers, including myself, had the proper tools at our disposal to export our mapped data into another mapping tool -- in my case, google maps.

the conversion itself was actually pretty painless; the only reason why it took me so long to come up with a replacement was because i needed time to grieve over the loss of something that i'd become attached to. and in a way, had been identified with.

once i was ready to move on, it was time to update my map... and its look. so i changed the place markers to push pins (the jury's still out about whether i'll keep these or switch them out for something else), added missing studios, marked as "closed" all the studios that are no longer in business, and basically just fixed anything that needed fixing.

i also implemented a slightly different color-coding scheme:
~ blue pins are yoga studios that are currently open
~ red pins are studios that have closed (including those that have moved; the red pin marks the old location while a blue pin marks the new)
~ green pins are donation-based yoga studios (and i'm hoping this proves to be useful to those experiencing financial difficulties)

i'll probably keep tweaking the map so make it more user-friendly... like i just realized that there's a big "platial the people's atlas" graphic right in the middle of each description bubble... more grunt work for me to do...

in the meantime, what do you think? comments are most welcome :)