So I have been trying to familiarise myself with Google Maps the only way I know how – in small little steps. Mostly using one or two tutorials, the documentation made available by google, and a bit of intuition 
So, first of is: Map One – This was just learning how to put the map on the page, playing with adding the controls, centering the map on locations etc. Then I thought I would just copy/paste the code to add ten random markers because, well, it looked pretty cool!
Map Two – For this I used a tutorial – It pulls locations out of a MySQL database (via lat, and long coordinates, as well as a title attribute) using PHP, then creates a simple PHP loop that echoes the code that creates the different markers for as many rows there are in the table.
That was useful but this site suggests that outputting the data into XML to be read into the page will have the following benefits: faster initial page load, easier debugging, and a more flexible map app. So I set about figuring out how to output MySQL data as an XML file: ba-da-bing. There appears to be a variety of methods to be able to do this but I set up a query to my database that echoed the results into an XML format. Maybe I could look into a function called domxml_new_doc() in the future?
Now, map three is using the same information as map two, but it is pulling it from the above-linked XML file instead of connecting directly to my database.
Progress. Slightly. Hurrah. Next up, geocoding places using markers and saving them to the database for XML use. Then I can get onto the real fun of playing with the routeplanner function of google maps, probably using this as some kind of guide initially.
