Offroad-Express

OK folks. We have a couple of cool new features to unleash on you.

Google Maps (requires medium - advanced computer skills/understanding)

Embed Google Maps directly into your posts to show people where you are talking about rather than having to explain it all the time. This allows you to include a variety of information on a map, including:

• Regular map
• Satellite imagery
• Address location
• Driving directions
• "My Maps" map with various points, paths and area polygons
• Whatever else Google comes up with...

To do this simply use http://maps.google.com like normal. Then, when you have the map just right and you want to share it with others you can do the following steps:

• Click on the "Link to this page" link on the top right of the map
• Copy the value in the "Paste link in email or IM" box by right clicking on it and choosing copy
• Click the gmap button above your post. This should insert a gmap tag in your post
• Paste the value copied above into the middle of the gmap tag using right-click paste or Ctrl+v
• Remove the http://maps.google.com/ from the beginning of that pasted URL
• Back in Google Maps, click on the "Customize and preview embedded map" link below where you copied the URL from in step 1. A new window will appear
• Scroll down to the bottom of the page and search through the URL embedded in box 3 until you find the s=<some_random_string> value and copy that. You are looking for something like "s=AARTsJo0wloDMuclLQW6DdNHi3nzRrB59w", and you just need to copy the bold bit
• Put a space after the value pasted in step 3 and then paste that s-value after it
• Preview your post

You should end up with something like this:


Which will give you the following map:


YouTube videos (easy)

You can now embed YouTube videos directly into your posts rather than just pasting links to the YouTube site. To do this, just follow these simple steps:

• Click the youtube button above your post to insert the youtube tag
• Go to the YouTube site and find the video you want
• Copy the value in the address bar at the top of your browser window where it says something like "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcuNDttCL4w". You just want the unique identifier in bold.
• Paste this value into the middle of the youtube tag
• Preview your post

You should end up with a tag in your post that looks like this:


Which gives you this:


Note that this video explains how to do the Google Maps one, with a couple of minor differences. The first is that you need to delete the start of the first URL copied. The second difference is that you don't need to use Notepad, you can click on the "Customize and preview embedded map" link, as explained above.

Good luck. If you have any probs then post here and I'll help you out.

Mark