From the swivellin' chair...

Inserting maps in a zoomed in state within your blog is useful for several reasons. Let's say you are travelling around the world, but as a part of that you spend a few months trekking up and down the east coast of Australia. Because your trip covers a lot of the world when you consider the starting and end points, the default display mode when inserted in a blog entry will be the entire world. However, if you've got a great shot of yourself surfing in Byron, you might well want to show your readers where exactly that was taken, instead of displaying a map of the world.

Here's how:

• Click on the 'Map' button while writing a new blog entry
  
• Select the trip in question from the drop down box
  
• Click on the 'Select Map View' button
  
• A map will appear with the selected trip outlined on it, something like this
  

• Zoom in on this until you have the view you'd like. In this case, I'm going to zoom in on Rarotonga, the capital island of the Cook Islands, like so

• Click on the 'Insert' button
  

The end result:

From this view a reader can still choose to zoom out, or pan to other parts of the world map if they like, and naturally they can click on one of the stops or photo locations on the trip to be redirected to your travel map page. The zoomed in view they see in your blog will even automatically be shown to them on the travel map page. Go ahead, try clicking on one of the green dots (photos) or on the dot placed at Avarua (trip stop), and view this in action.

Too easy!