As regular visitors of our weblog will know, there is an overview of restaurants of which consider they are good to exceptional (you can find that overview of Cafe’s and Dinners here.
As Marion and Rob go often out for dinner during their weekends together, I guess you can say it so kind of hobby of them, the list of restaurants grew quite some over time.
Especially around Haaksbergen (where Marion lives and Rob grew up) and Heemskerk (where Rob currently lives) there are a lot of restaurants they visit. Mind you, only restaurants they consider good or better will make it to the list.
Somewhere last year Rob opened up his weblog for his close friends and with that he opened also this list.
This leaded to more entries around Haaksbergen and Heemskerk. But our dear friend Mel also started to add entries and as she lives in Greece (Lesvos to be precise) that area also started to show good restaurants.
But there is even more to it. Marion travels very often through Europe for her work. She does not always like to eat at the hotels she is staying and eats at restaurants that were recommended to her. Some time ago, she started to add restaurants she enjoyed to the list, giving it a more European coverage. Patricia, who works as a flight attendant for a big international working airline company, followed up the idea of Marion. This made the list really international.
So some time ago Rob and I were pondering if we could not do something more with all this list of good restaurants. Quickly the idea was there to put them on a map. We both liked that idea.
But this map should be dynamic and easy to maintain. After some time we found exactly what we were looking for…
The map above is not the dynamic map, just a picture and nothing more. For the dynamic map you have to go to the actual list of Cafés and Dinners.
At the top of the map there is an option to search the map. You can enter there an address, city/town or country. You can also change the way the result of the search will be displayed (map, satellite, hybrid or terrain).Next, you can select which map you want to see. Actually, we are trying to remove this because there will be only one map.
And you select from a dropdown-list the restaurants from the list. The list is sorted on the name of the restaurants.
While holding the left mouse-button it is possible to move the map around, basically in all directions as long you hold the mouse-button.Of course it is also possible to zoom in and out. This can be done by holding the CTRL-key and using the scroll-wheel of the mouse. Also, there are on the right bottom of the map two buttons that can be used for zooming in and out.
Zooming in can be done to street level and where available Google Streetview can be used.
When clicking on the pin that locates a restaurant, a window with more information will pop up, such as the address.
When known, it will show who of our group has been there and when. In the beginning the kind of information was not placed in the list, so there may be restaurant without this information.
Sometimes a small message may be added as the “back, because we loved it the last time” in the screenshot above.
The “More information’ link in the window will open the website of the restaurant (in a new browser window).
We are thinking about doing more with this window, but there are so many options and possibilities that we will leave it for now like this.
Not all restaurants on the list are already on the map. It is quite some work to do.
Amsterdam, to mention one, still has to be done. Rob lived for more as a year in Amsterdam without the possibility to cook. So in that time he often visited restaurants in that time. But of course, in the Amsterdam will also be added to the map.
One thing we noticed while checking all the websites on the list: Many restaurants are closed. Now I can imagine the world of restaurants is very dynamic and that it changes fast, still it is sad to see…
Anyway, enjoy the new map 🙂