I've been playing with a particularly promising Google Maps hack (that's a tool, not an illegal break-in) called gmaptrack that lets you upload coordinates of places you'd like to point out on a Google Map.

The idea is to plot greater Rhode Island beaches on a map of southern New England. I found a great site -- earthsearch.net -- that spits out a list of latitude and longitudes for everything called "beach" (one of many choices) in any state.

But as I got bleary last night and deadline approached, I hadn't worked out how to get my test file containing just one beach to work.

I had promised newspaper readers satellite views of the beaches via Google Maps today, in an "on the web" promo accompanying a story about local folks' favorite beaches. (reg.req.)

Out came the newsroom equivalent of bubble gum and paper clips: I wrote a quick story explaining how to do it yourself, manually.

This morning I tackled it again, and this time the whole list went up easily. It's still crude, not ready for the site, but you can take a look at the work in progress: Greater Rhode Island beaches

(If you're a Mac user, Google Maps does not work with Safari. Sorry.)

As you can see, there are just too many beaches, and too many icons -- the list stretches way down the page, with only the bottom icons showing. I may divide them into East Bay and South County beaches. (If you're not from here, South County doesn't exist. It's just our way of talking about "down there" in the southwestern part of the state.)

Each pop-up balloon now contains only the name of the beach as it came from earthsearch, and these aren't what we actually call some of them. There are fields to add a Photo, URL, address and text, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

I'm grateful to folks like the gmaptrak builder who take the Google API and run with it, and especially for making an interface that lets English majors like me do something useful with this technologly.