This project is a quick experiment to see whether a maps-style interface can improve accessiblity of some of the Guardian's travel writing. Some of the content is already geo-tagged, so this app just takes those geotags and links to the articles from a google map. It scans for new content in the API and will include that automatically, though Google heavily cache the map overlays so I'm not sure what the latency is yet.

There are around 33,000 items of guardian content tagged travel, though many of these are not geotagged.

The API only lets you query for 50 at once, and cannot (currently) filter on only geotagged items.

So, a background process scans for modified content, and maintains a database in MongoDB. The runtime app uses this database to build a KML file that Google Maps can use as an overlay

The app itself is implemented in Scala, using akka for background scheduling, casbah and salat to talk to mongo, the lift web framework, the Guardian's Content API scala client and Bootstrap, from Twitter.

Right now, it's hosted - for free - by CloudBees and MongoHQ. You can see it running at here.

Although I work for the Guardian, and helped implement the Open Platform Content API, this is entirely a personal project and has no connection at all with the Guardian.