After procrastinating for what seems like half a year, I finished my article Seattle Movie Finder: An AJAX and REST-Powered Virtual Earth Mashup which has now been published on O'Reilly XML.com. The article is a walkthrough of how I built my Seattle Movie Finder application with a few tips on building mapping mashups.

I think the most useful tip from the article is letting people know about the geocoder.us API which provide REST, SOAP and XML-RPC services for converting addresses to latitudes and longitudes. That discovery helped a great deal. The Virtual Earth folks currently advise people who want geocoding to register for the MapPoint SOAP Web services which was too much of a hassle for me. On the other hand, the free and zero hassle geocoder.us got the job done. 

I'm thinking of turning this into a series with the next article explaining how I built my MSN Spaces Photo Album Browser gadget for Live.com. Let me know what you think of the article.