I’ve been playing around with Google Maps for some time now, at least since May of this year. I used to be a diehard Yahoo Maps user but now I use Google Maps almost exclusively. The ajax in Google Maps won me over and definitely has a cool factor. As such, I wanted to integrate it somehow with the website. I toyed with using Google Maps in some way related to directions to HQ for the Adventure24 this year, but didn’t have enough time to play with it to do anything in time for the race. That has changed courtesy of the Google Maps API.

Presenting our new registered teams “list”; modeled after the Competitor Map from the Checkpoint Zero Adventure Race. The new team “list” is the newest feature on our website. There are really two reasons why I made the change to a Google Map “list”. 1) It just looks cool. 2) Less xhtml coding! The previous Team List I edited by hand each time a team registered. Now, we have an admin section of the website and we just go to the form and enter in the City, State, Team Name, Captain Name and select the race name and team division from drop down menus and hit enter. They are now added to the appropriate map (the form feeds both the UOG and A24 map) and the counter of registered teams is updated. We have some ajax goodness baked right into our form too! We are using the Yahoo Maps API for geocoding which returns the latitude and longitude of the city/state and automatically puts the information straight into our form. This will save me heaps of time and is cool to boot!

Look for more changes in the coming months! Some of it you will notice and some of it will be behind the scenes stuff to make the website easier to manage on the backend. Thanks to my fellow RD and staff member Patrick for the help with the ajax goodness on the geocoding.

I just read that Ivan Basso, formerly of Team CSC, has signed a two year contract with the Discovery Channel team. What does this mean for Basso? Provided he can stay healthy, he is without a doubt the favorite for the 2007 Tour de France. He was the favorite of many (including myself) going into this years Tour de France before he was not allowed to start. With the kind of support that Discovery can provide, he is now even closer to winning his first Tour de France. This is HUGE for Team Discovery which struggled in the first year since the retirement of Lance Armstrong.

The Raid World Championship will be on NBC this weekend. The RAID will be part of the Jeep World of Adventure Sports show on November 11th. Check your local listings for the air time and don’t forget to tune in!

The people who have brought you the Blue Ridge Mountain Adventure Race for the past 9 years will be hosting the 2008 USARA National Championship Race. 2007 with mark the 10th year of the race and I believe it may be the longest running adventure race in the United States. Blue Ridge has long been one of my favorite outdoor playgrounds. Blue Ridge, GA is within a short 1.5 hour drive from my house and features fun paddling, great single track, and plenty of trails and FS roads to ride and run. The race will definitely have plenty of hills!