Google has decided to begin charging for the downloading of
its maps by websites although they claim that the first 100,000 downloads per month on any website are free. helladic.info uses
Google maps throughout and it is very unlikely that helladic.info would
ever experience 100,000 map downloads and so this new policy would not seem to
concern us.
However Google wants my payment information anyway (something it has never done before) even
though helladic.info would fall into the 98% of sites that will not be affected
by this policy. The payment information
is the sticking point .. along with some controversy about what 100,000
downloads really means. I don’t wish to
be exposed to this risk.
Therefore I have decided to move away from Google maps and
reprogram the map pages to use Open Street Map and ESRI maps. Indeed the first two rewrites (Place Key
Report and Feature Key Report) pages are already delivered.
The new maps have more feature layers - you can try it out yourself –
and they function just like the old pages did.
I don’t anticipate any impact on the way the site is used by making this
change. There is, however, significant
rewriting still to do and I’m not certain that I can complete this by June 11
which is the cutoff date.
I’ll try to let you all know in advance if things change or
if features are broken. You can help me by reporting problems that you may
experience during this time of refit.
Maps on the Internet are a constantly changing and improving scene and,
as I find new appropriate functionality, I will try to incorporate changes that I think useful.
Thanks for your understanding.
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