A screenshot of using BatchGeocode to take a spreadsheet of addresses and turn it into a nice map. 

Over at Grid Chicago, my other blog that sucks all the time from this blog, I’ve recently written tutorials on how to create online maps, first with Google My Maps (which they renamed to My places) and secondly with BatchGeocode (which renamed itself to BatchGeo because it does more than geocoding now).

Google My Maps is primitive as far as map making goes, but it has the lowest learning curve and it’s easy: you just click on the map where you want something to go and fill in the info window. Read that tutorial.

BatchGeocode is slightly more advanced, but takes your tabular data (most likely from a spreadsheet) and throws it on a map you can embed on your website. They do have pay features. Read the tutorial for BatchGeocode.

I’ve written about BatchGeocode for QGIS, as it was once the only way to do geocoding in QGIS. But now BatchGeocode doesn’t give you a results table that has the latitude and longitude (apparently this is against Google Maps’s terms of service). But I updated the article to talk about using other methods for geocoding in QGIS.

I will be writing two more tutorials, one about GeoCommons and one about Google Fusion Tables.