All through my journey as a computer programmer I've had the conviction that whatever you can conceive can ultimately be achieved. Sometimes it's damned hard and really stretches my brain to it's limit but I push on and when it finally works it's a true eureka moment where I thrust my arms in the air and yell yea!

The sad thing is that most of the time nobody sees it or gets it, except me. So tonight, I'm going to put my latest breakthrough out there just because this is my blog and I can. Wether you read on is up to you...

The challenge I faced is that the articles (posts) in this blog are simply lightweight shells from which I can dish out a little PHP and Javascript, but not build a complicated app within. So, I have to construct a window (called an iframe) inside the post which runs the app and then add functionality around it within the post. In the example below I present a zipcode map of my area.

The map is inside the window and is a stand-alone complicated piece of mapping code that I've developed to handle the context, which in this case is showing the outline of the zip code over the area. I have other apps that show individual counties and multiples of both. All run inside of a window.

The complication arises from the communication between the shell (the blog post) and the map program. As the user pans and zooms the map I needed to know what the lat/lng and zoom values are when the user stops, so I can pass those values to the very cool functions available for that location (on the bottom). You can see those numbers in the lower left corner of the map.

I really wanted to open the functions in the same tab as the map, so that clicking the back button brings you back to the map but the nature of browser history is such that it refreshes the page and you lose that position you have so carefully panned and zoomed down to.

Well, with some amazing code, I've pulled that off. You can now zoom down to a neighborhood you want to see and all of the functions are relative to that position and zoom level and when you go back, you're still there on the map.

This is a game changer as far as I'm concerned. It's now a really valuable tool for checking out an area. All of the map functions give you a different perspective based on the provider (Google, Bing, Streetview and OpenStreetMap), and even my new Flickr Geo app will give you photos taken within a mile.

So, enough of my rambling, enter your zipcode here, zoom down to your house and see what I'm talking about. Oh, and one last thing, click on the lat/lng lower left when you get around to it...