Making Interactive Maps for the Web

This tutorial teaches students how to create beautiful, interactive maps for the web. When asked to display geodata, most developers decide to put some big red markers on an embeddable Google Map and call it a day. If you're interested in creating maps that are more beautiful, more interactive, and more usable, this tutorial is for you.

By the end of this tutorial, students will be able to build a light version of Trulia's crime maps: http://trulia.com/crime/

Hour 1: The back-end

• Storing geodata in PostgreSQL
• Querying geodata with GeoDjango
• Ways to customize GeoDjango's admin

Hour 2: The front-end

• Displaying geodata on a map with Polymaps
• Creating and designing map tiles with TileStache

Hour 3: Dessert

• Adding interactivity to maps
• How to make geodata pretty