Acorn Community

You’re welcome.

I made a thing which is potentially useful, and since it took me a while to figure out how to do it, I thought I would lay out the steps here so that other people can also make potentially useful things with less effort than it took me.

The thing is a Google Map with various custom overlays. Here you can see where Birddog has created a layer showing us where all the perennials are on the property. Now I know where to go to get my persimmon fix, which beats my previous strategy of walking around blindly biting the air until I found one by chance.

Rejoice made a layer that shows us what the various garden areas are named. This should be useful for getting new people up to speed. It also does some handy calculations, showing us that field B is 0.43 acres big and has a perimeter of 567 feet. Neat!

Here’s two layers which together show the layout of all the utilities on the property. We previously had a sketch of this on our wiki, but this should be more accurate and easier to keep updated.

Is this potentially useful to you? Great! Here’s how to make your own. First of all, don’t do what I did, which is spend an hour fruitlessly exploring every nook and cranny of the Google Maps interface, screaming and tearing out your hair when the path forward is not forthcoming. No, you’re smarter than that. You know Google would never do something as silly as putting a link to their map creation tool in the maps section of their website. You’ll go straight to Google Drive, where there is a “new” button, which when clicked on, easily yields a brand spanking blank map for you to scribble all over.

Go nuts! The interface allows you to make points, lines, and polygons. You can change the colors and such to create a snazzy organizational scheme. Each feature you create has a title, and also a description where you could keep notes about the things you’re mapping.

You can keep the map private, send certain people invitations to view or edit it, create a link which grants whoever uses it the ability to view or edit it, or you can publish the map publicly. Unfortunately, there’s no option to prevent the CIA from getting their hands on it.

But three letter organizations bent on world domination aside, yay maps! If you have any ideas for other nifty things we could do with this, leave them in the comments! Oh my god, I just went full blogger.