Have you ever wanted to make a map of everywhere you raced or have wanted to race? Well you can! I actually have two of these maps. I have a traditional map of the United States mounted on my wall in the hallway and I place magnetic pins on it–however today I want to talk about the digital version I keep.
If you’re a Gmail user, which if you’re not then you should get with the times, then you have a cool maps feature in your Google Drive. Under your Google Drive you click New → More → My Google Maps.
Here is where you can drop pins for any location in the world! You can drop them manually or type in a location and it’ll create a pin.
You can assign a pin color from a pallet (where you can change the icon of the pin from like 500 different choices) and enter some information in a limited text box (click the pencil icon), say if you wanted to write stuff about your race. You can even add a picture to your pin. You can get driving directions to the pin by clicking the arrow by the fork in the road.
Then you accept the pin and it gets assigned to a layer. The cool thing about layers is you can separate all your pins. For example, I have like eight layers that are assigned to past races, future races, this season, next season, etc. I assign those pins a specific color too so you can tell them all apart. With layers you can turn them on and off too.
The neat thing that your virtual map on Google Drive has that a physical map on your wall doesn’t is the ability to zoom. You can zoom in to extremely close too, like the exact location of a swim start for example.
And there you have your own personalized map, and you can share it with other people–just make it non-editable by the people you invite by selecting “view only”. If you want to see mine leave a comment!
Inside the Mind of Eric Esposito 