I will, as promised go into some more advanced coding stuff later on this week, but first, here’s a few tips for people who might not be javascript savvy, or for whatever reason might not have code access to their sites (thanks to Andrew Beeken (@abeeken) from Lincoln City Council)

Simply follow these steps and get a planning application map like this on your own site!

Step 1: Get the your RSS feed

As detailed in Part 1, feeds are returned in this format:

http://www.planningalerts.com/api.php?call=authorityauthority;=**[some name]**

Just replace [some name] with the name of your council (without the ‘district / borough council’ suffix) for example:

http://www.planningalerts.com/api.php?call=authority=Tamworth

Once you’ve got an address, test it out in your browser and move on

Step 2: Get your code

Next we need to get some code, first, with the RSS feed link copied to your clipbboard, go to the Google Maps Website, paste the feed link into the search box and click the ‘Search Maps’ button. The feed will show up in the map as below:

Once that’s done, click on the ‘link’ link on the right hand side of the screen and a window will appear. Select all the code in the second box (marked ‘Paste HTML to embed in website’)

If you want to change the size of the map first, you can click on ‘Customize and preview embedded map’ and follow the onscreen prompts

Step 3: Add the code to your site!

Well, pretty self explanatory really! Armed with the code, go into your CMS and add the code!

Any questions, comments, suggestions etc, please let me know.