Image Maps

I was finishing up a chapter in my textbook about images. Last example problem in the back of the chapter had us dealing with a image of the solar system. Each planet was to be clickable, generating a pop-up with some words about the planet clicked. I got a nice image of the solar system. Now I needed to come up with the coordinates for the planet areas. What is a developer to do?

The book mentioned some free software that would do the dirty work of coordinate mapping for me. I went to Image Maps. Uploaded my picture to their web site. Then it was time to get down to business. I had to define eight areas (we now only have eight planets in the solar system). I was a little disturbed when a warning came up that stated, "IE 7 will give a stack overflow error after 13 or 14 rectangle maps." I use Internet Explorer. Luckily I only had 8 areas to create.

I clicked a button and had the HTML generated for me. It was quite painless. Seems like the site is implemented using PHP. They ask for donations, links, or blog entries about them. Being a poor developer, I chose the latter. Thanks Image Maps.