Bing Maps | Live Writer Basics

Inserting maps in blog posts

Posted by Ludwig in General on January 17, 2012

Maps can make an article more informative and more interesting, and an interactive map provides a gateway to enjoyable resources to your readers. With Windows Live Writer, inserting a map is just about as easy as inserting a photo.

Let me walk through the procedure with an example. Let’s say that my blog article, about a fun vacation experience, contains a photo of the lighthouse on Tybee Island, Georgia. The story can be enhanced by displaying the location with a couple of maps.

The Insert ribbon in the Media group sports a Map icon. This provides for inserting Bing maps. The Insert Map dialog starts with a world map. There is a Find location: text box which is the quickest way to show a map of a specific location. Just enter the name of the location of interest, click the magnifier “search” icon, and up comes your location..

The dialog shows a live Bing map. You can drag it around, enlarge or decrease the view, just as you can when you are using Bing Maps. Also available are “Road”, “Aerial”, or “Bird’s Eye” view. The road view, like a normal road map, is available for all parts of the globe. Aerial view, or what some call satellite view, coverage is nearly complete. The “bird’s eye” views are low level, oblique, aerial photos. Many destinations have been mapped this way. So you can select the best map for your post. In this article I have included two maps to illustrate the variety. But first the lighthouse photo, and below that a couple of maps. A road map to give provide location information and a “bird’s eye” view..

Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia

Oblique aerial view of the Tybee Island lighthouse

Here in this blog post, as in your blog, these maps will lead to full-size Bing Map pages when clicked. In Windows Live Writer a map insert behaves a bit like an inserted photo. When clicked, a border is shown around it and there are option in a side bar on the right.

You can see the border around the selected road map in the illustration above. The map can be resized with the resize handles the customary manner. The Customize Map… link in the side bar, brings up the customize dialog which is essentially the same as the insert dialog. You can move the displayed portion around and resize the view. You can also add a caption and customize the margins.

To make the location easier to communicate to the reader, I have zoomed out the map enough to show recognizable landmarks in the map, here Savannah, Georgia and Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

I have also added a “pushpin” showing the location of the lighthouse. That is a mixed blessing. You can see that in the insert and edit dialogs there is a text line under the map saying: “Tip: Right-click the map to add a pin”. A pushpin will be added at the clicked location. You can move it around and specify some additional parameters. Unfortunately, the default operation brings up the “my places editor” on the viewer’s map, which may be more confusing than helpful.

.:.