Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

bird flu on steroids

A new-and-improved version of the bird flu map went live this week at washingtonpost.com. The highlight of the redesigned page is the new map, which is much larger and allows users to zoom into individual continents. Country information — including the number of human bird flu cases and the date bird flu was first detected — is available for each affected country as a little mouseover tooltip. And, on our end, the graphic is a lot easier to update. Unlike the original map, which had to be updated by hand, this new map is driven by an XML file updated by our producers. If a new country has to be highlighted, all they have to do is add that country (and its related information) to the XML file. Piece of cake.

I applied what I learned with the bird flu map to another interactive, XML-powered map that also went live last week, highlighting the countries of Latin America and their respective political situations.