I've been rather enjoying myself a bit these last two weeks. I've found a way to combine several of my personal interests into one project, Geography, Web Site design, and Mark Twain. I've been blogging about Twain for a couple of years now, based around my readings of his books while in the guise of SLClemens, an avatar in the virtual world of Second Life. For some time I've been curious about adding dynamic maps to web pages. Google Earth and Google Maps, among others, have become rather common but it has still been rather cumbersome to incorporate multiple data points to these maps, let alone polygons and lines. Developers of Drupal modules have come up with some great solutions; Geofield, IP Geolocation Maps and Views, Leaflet and a number of other related modules.

I've been able to install these modules on my site and create nodes for points of interest from Mark Twain's book The Innocents Abroad. I should say here that there are many more landmarks that could be included and I will try to get to them, but that will require another close reading of the book. The points I have been able to plot come from three sources. The first is the Quaker City Excursion Itinerary from the Mark Twain Project, University of California. The second is from Ian Strathcarron, the writer of Innocents and War. He has generously provided me with notes and a spreadsheet of data used in researching his travels following in the footsteps of Mark Twain through the Holy Land. I have quoted him a number of times in comments throughout my Innocents Abroad web pages. The third main source comes from David Fears, the author of Mark Twain Day By Day, an epic attempt to document Mark Twain's life day by day. He provided me with a copy of pages for the year 1867, the year of the excursion.

The plotted data has allowed me to create an index of locations for this book. I have added it as the penultimate chapter of my on-line book. Also, Ian Strathcarron mentioned his use of the 1861 Rumsey Historical Map of Jerusalem. The map includes caravan routes of the day. Some of these are likely routes taken by Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) and his pilgrim friends. A copy of a part of this map, with what looked to me to be the most likely route of travel highlighted, is the final chapter of my on-line version of The Innocents Abroad.

Each chapter of the book is a node or page on my web site and each contains a link to the YouTube video of the avatar SLClemens reading the chapter. The videos are made up of the illustrations from the first edition of the book, pictures and other images from Wikipedia Commons as well as segments recorded of the Second Life venues. Each of the chapter also has a map illustrating the sites of interest in the chapter. This is not complete, however, as there are so many more places and sites to include.