I have been creating my own Google maps a lot recently, largely in support of an upcoming attempt at the 3 Peaks 24 hour challenge – hiking up the three highest mountains in the UK all in 24 hours. I’ve got various maps for the three hiking trails, plus a few put together to help plan training walks.

I’ve been scratching around for a while experimenting with various ways of sharing these maps, and embedding within a WordPress blog seems a good thing to do.

For blogs that you host yourself and can upload new plugins too, there is Inline Google Maps, which gives results like this:

And lets see!

Oh….the damned thing doesn’t work…..Back to the drawing board….

Here’s an attempt with Google Maps for WordPress :

[googleMap name=”Chatsworth, Derbyshire” description=”Somewhere nice” width=”100%” height=”300″ directions_to=”false”]Chatsworth, Derbyshire[/googleMap]

This works really nicely – lots of control over the map, and you get immediate navigation. And it just worked. But the problem with this is that apparently I can only use place names for the map. What I really want to do is to embed my own custom maps. For example, this one for the 3 Peaks challenge.

I’ve left a query with the author of the plugin, but in the meantime it’s back to the drawing board again for GM plugins.

Update (23rd May): The author – Aaron Campbell – said in this comment saying that at present he has no plans to update the plugin to take user specified maps. This is a great shame – customised Google maps are incredibly useful, and being able to embed these in a posting would be great. So, maybe I’ll write my own plugin. It’s only software – how hard can it be? 🙂  Don’t hold your breath though, I’m a busy chap…