I've successfully embedded Google Static Maps in an RSS feed that I'm working on, and it displays great in standalone feed readers. Unfortunately, if someone tries to subscribe to my feed using a web-based reader/aggregator (such as Google Reader), my images don't show up. Presumably, the referer of the aggregator website is sent to maps.google.com, which rejects the request as not matching my API key.
Read full entry »I thought I was being so clever when I put a content-negotiated API into TradeUps.net, my web development playground. To put it simply, a page can return the same information in different formats, depending upon the HTTP Accept: header. For example, this profile page (view only in Firefox for now) responds to a standard browser request with an HTML document, but returns JSON when it sees Accept: application/json as a header. In this case, a script on the page calls the same URL (/user/admin) again to get the map data in javascript-friendly format. That's where the weirdness starts.