I’ve been looking for something like this for a looong time. What I want is a map of the world that I can put on my website, and people can add their locations to it and a pin/marker will show up. I used to maintain a map by hand but that was a huuuuuge pain in the ass. I found a free service, (the one I set up is here) but it has a few problems:
I built something like this a year or two ago. It wasn’t as difficult as I had anticipated. Get a nice sized image of a world map. Download a list of city names with latitudes and longitudes. I kept a detailed list of the cities in the United States and Canada, but only capitals or very large cities in other countries. When a city is selected by the end user, translate the lat/long to a pixel location within the map and add a “pin” image with javascript. I also let the user add cities to my list, if they could supply their own lat/long. I’m not sure where I’ve stored the code and images, but if you can’t find anything suitable on the web, I’ll try to dig it up for you.
