Running Reality for Bloggers
Running Reality can be used by bloggers and other writers to give their readers a link to a historical map (or embed one) for a particular day and location in history.
Why this project might be of interest
Running Reality tries to show the world as it was on any given date in history and at any point on the world. This lets you quickly place sites in context. As more people contribute to our history model, we'll have more and more detail about nation borders, governments, battles, people, migrations, populations, roads and shipping lanes, and buildings.
Linking and Embedding
You can link directly to a map of any date or location in history on your blog.
The basic parameters are:
07/08/1585The date, either just the year or the month/day/year.36.30364,-78.47428The latitude and longitude to 5 decimal places, in decimal degrees.zoom=7The zoom level from 1 to 15.
Far more options are available to customize the look of embedded maps to better address the specific needs of your visitors and audience to better illustrate your content:
Map Images
From the share menu of the app version of Running Reality, you can embed an image or movie into your own work. You can copy-paste an image of the map directly to your computer's clipboard. You can save a JPEG image of a point in time or save an MP4 movie or GIF animation of a span of time.
Note that the web map uses a Mercator projection but the app uses an equi-rectangular projection. In most cases, you might not notice a difference, but at street level, Mercator keeps right angles looking correct and equi-rectangular can show some distortion. Eventually, we will migrate the app to Mercator.
Inbound blog links and link exchanges
We very much appreciate inbound links, as they help other people learn about Running Reality. We would be happy to reciprocate a link back in return. Because Running Reality is an app, our in-app citations back to your blog will not be found and counted by Google for your page rank. We will periodically take a snapshot of all in-app citation links and generate a web page of them. In that way, we can produce a web page that search engines will scan that reciprocates inbound links.
Outbound citation links to your blog
Just like with any other research project, Running Reality strives for solid and thorough citations of reference works. As a work of historical context, we cannot ever express the level of narrative detail that a work such as a book can. So, we hope that our use of citations also functions as a way for people to find their way to your work once they have found they have an interest in a particular point in history. This should be mutually beneficial for both Running Reality and detailed, copyrighted research work. We hope you agree and please let us know if you would like additional links to your work included so people can better navigate to your work.