By: E&P Staff The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., paid tribute to America's armed forces on Monday by featuring an interactive U.S. map of American servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The
color-coded map first appeared Monday as part of the Post's Fourth of July package. It shows the casualties of war by city and state and even notes how many from a particular town were killed.
Click on one of the dots and a soldier's name, age, gender, rank, and branch appear in a pop-up window, along with the date they died and the operation in which they served.
"At first we weren't even sure how, technically, how we were going to do it," said William M. Hartnett, a Palm Beach Post staff writer who compiled the data and created the map. "We had hoped someone else had done it, so we wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel," he joked.
Information on the deceased soldiers was derived from the Associated Press' database of military casualties, and a software extention to HTML Image Mapper was used to create the multicilored map. Latitude and longitude coordinates had to be entered for towns throughout the United States.
Despite the amount of Web traffic the paper's Web site was enjoying by Tuesday afternoon, Hartnett said the paper has no plans to keep the map updated; the software used in its creation doesn't allow for that. He added, "To keep it current on a daily basis would be a full-time job."
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