Displaying a round-the-world itinerary with Google Maps Part 6

A few weeks ago – while we were in Tahiti, but again in New Zealand – I noticed that the “visited” path from the Garmin site wasn’t being integrated properly into the Google Map integrated into our family blog. After a little bit of analysis, I realised that the amount of tracking data being pulled down each time the map was being built was large (upwards of 10MB). I figured it was probably related to the connection speed – the page had trouble getting all that data in time – but of course having a page query 10MB+ plus of data (that will result in the same data for every page loaded in every browser) isn’t the best way to build a site.

Attempting to address the problem, I thought about ways to reduce this payload. The obvious one was to take the KML data from previous months of the trip and compress it into a single KMZ. I looked at ways to do this, and found you can load the respective KMLs – which I downloaded via the URLs contained in the source of Part 5,…

Read more