When we started out, I had no idea about web-based mapping, or locative media, and the word "ajax" didn't even exist in terms of web programming. When we first wrote the applications, we blindly thought... well, I don't know what we thought. We just thought it needed a map, and I knew I'd figure out how to get one. After stupidly asking a few companies who never responded to us, I went the way of open source -- first there were two months spent trying to compile MapServer on a cranky Linux Box, and then there was the realisation that there's no good free mapping data in Australia. While in America, you can download free GIS data for any major city, here down under, it's one of those things that government departments and quangos hoard mercilessly -- it's our data! You can't have it! We tried Sensis, who make the Whereis wotsit, but they were less than useful -- they dismissed our application, which we spent about a month writing, completely out of hand and told us they needed $20,000 for the data we wanted.

Finally, after something like six months of deliberation, pleading, and long scooter rides out to Midland, the Western Australian Department of Land Information came through and (praise them to the skies!) gave us their Perth metro vector data for free. And we were all excited and it was time to start wrestling with the strange graphic format they used for their actual map imagery, which of course wasn't supported by our machine. And then Google launched Google Maps, and everything changed.

So here we are, 6 months after that, and in those tiny fragments of spare time I've not had, I've taught myself more javascript than I ever thought I'd need to know (and I knew a fair bit to start with), and we have the end result, a mash-up of google maps (with custom navigation controls as the Google ones were fugly), the DLI data piped in through Mapserver, the works of all the writers, some crazy back and forth going on in the background using Ajax-style communication (over SOAP) to our server, and some good old-fashioned PHP to top things off. It's still not finished, but it's finally presentable. And lickable. Try searching for something for some real coolness. In my time working in the web, I must have launched 50 or 60 websites, probably more, but I've never been so excited as with this one. It's my baby.

So please, check it out, contribute something if you have something to contribute, and let me know what you think. And thanks to Natalija Brunovs and Richard Southern, who went on this journey with me -- we three have made it! And we're still sane, and still talking to each other, and you don't have to listen to me mutter excuses about problems compiling dependencies that you don't understand. It's done!

And if you're in Perth, please come down to the launch on Thursday December 15 at the Breadbox Gallery in Northbridge. We're going to have some crazy fun, it's not often they let writers loose in a gallery space!