Alright, buckle up, ’cause I’m gonna walk you through how I whipped up that “map of usa football teams” thing. It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, but hey, we got there in the end.
First off, the idea just kinda popped into my head. I was watching a game, and thought, “Wouldn’t it be cool to see where all the teams are located on a map?” So, yeah, that’s where it all started. A random thought.
Next, I figured I needed some data. I mean, duh, right? Team names, locations… the whole shebang. I started by Googling around. I managed to piece together a list of NFL teams. Took a while, jumping between different websites to cross-reference and make sure I wasn’t missing anyone.
Okay, so I had the team names. Now for the locations. This was trickier than I thought. Stadium addresses were easy enough to find, but I wanted something a little more… geographical? I wanted latitude and longitude coordinates. Back to Google I went, searching for each team individually. Copy, paste, copy, paste… you know the drill. My fingers were aching after a while!
With all the data collected, it was time to actually build the map. I decided to use this javascript mapping library called Leaflet. Seemed straightforward enough. I created an HTML file, linked the Leaflet CSS and JS, and started coding. I initially thought I was so smart, but then I started realizing things were not going according to plan.
The first hurdle? Getting the data into Leaflet. I ended up creating a JavaScript array of objects, each object containing the team name, latitude, and longitude. Then, I looped through the array, creating a marker for each team on the map. Each marker would contain a popup with team info.
Of course, things never go smoothly, right? I ran into a bunch of problems along the way. Markers not showing up, popups displaying incorrectly… the usual debugging nightmares. Spent way too much time staring at the console, trying to figure out what went wrong. A lot of it was just silly typos or missing semicolons. You know how it is.
The map looked ugly as hell. I knew nothing about web design or UI stuff. I spent some time playing around with the CSS, trying to make it look presentable. Changed the marker colors, added a background, tweaked the fonts. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough.
Finally, after a whole lot of trial and error, I had a working map of NFL teams! You could zoom in, zoom out, click on the markers to see the team names. I was pretty stoked, to be honest. It wasn’t the most polished thing in the world, but it was mine, and it worked!
If I were to do it again, I’d think about using a proper database to store the team data. I would also get some help from a front end person to make things look better, and have an interface. But overall, it was a fun little project, and I learned a lot along the way.
