The official wordpress FAQ has some nice tips – http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Javascript#Troubleshooting_Javascript
- in particular the idea, mentioned toward the bottom, that you might want to use the “no formatting” options to stop wordpress helpfully putting in paragraph marks where they don’t belong would sort you out.

If you want to get a bit more full-on:
http://digwp.com/2009/06/including-jquery-in-wordpress-the-right-way/

it’s the one that you go to when you click on my name, or here: http://j.map-netcultures.net/ i pretty much followed the instructions and copied and pasted the html stuff i was given and added in the googlemaps api key, but it doesn’t appear….

YEs, that sounds like a wordpress issue, of sorts. I can embed a rich flash object in my test blog (e.g.) with no problems.

I would guess that in this case, the problem is to do with some kind of javascript clash. Can you post me a link to the page and let me know what you expect to be happening ?

I successfully mapped my data using some of the stuff you used in this post, but mainly http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/spreadsheetsmapwizard/makecustommap.htm, but when I copy the code into WordPress it doesn’t work. I tried copying the code into Dreamweaver in a blank html file in the body section, and that works, but when I copy the code and paste it into a wordpress post and when i preview it, all i see is basically the outline of where the map should be, but it doesn’t appear. Do we need to do something different when we put code into a wordpress post? and yes, i pasted it in the html section, not the visual section. you can check out what appears by going to my site. And i forgot the site to use to dump my code, but the code seemed to work fine in a blank Dreamweaver html file, so is it something more to do with WordPress rather than the code? Hope this makes sense!

-j

1. the ownership of a domain NAME (e.g. we own the domain map-netcultures.net)
2. the usage of a domain name SERVICE (e.g. dreamhost is the DNS provider for our map-netcultures.net domain)
3. and the hosting of your actual web site and email etc (dreamhost again, for us, although on physically separate machines)

all of which can be with different companies.

A registrar like joker.com or http://www.auda.org.au/ can sell you registration of given name. They might also offer to provide DNS for the domain name, or that might be done by the web host, or even a third party specialist DNS provider.

You web host, in turn, usually needs to know about what domains you have registered so that it knows what name it must serve your site under. It might also provide integrated DNS servers that set this stuff up automatically.

Dreamhost, for example, does all three of those things at once, in a reasonably integrated way. I’ve never had problems with their domain name registration, but their DNS servers are down there with their web hosting in terms of quality. Best practice is probably to go with specialist DNS servers.

You can often ignore all this stuff for a small personal site. But even the smallest users often have reason to know about it. Let’s say I wanted to integrate, for example, a tumblr weblog into a domain that you own – totally possible, even though I don’t own the tumblr software, nor the computer where there software is hosted – all I have to do is, as per their instructions, configure my DNS provider properly and then tell them about it. This works with lots of things – google apps, blogger, wordpress.com, jotit. Some of these folks charge you money for the privilege, though!

Why does this matter? It matters because of a little study on server energy usage conducted by Stanford in 2007. Thanks to the explosion of video, VOIP and an increase of broadband Internet services, energy consumed by data centers from 2000 to 2005 doubled. And it’s only been getting worse over the past 4+ years since the study.