Adding a Local Guides Banner to your Local Guides Connect signature

Google Maps tips & tricks
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Most of us are very proud of our accomplishments on Google Maps, and want to share this with everybody on Local Guides Connect. I’ve seen several people adding this information to their signature (not just the level, but also photo views etc). But then you have to maintain your signature and update it once in a while with the new statistics. As a software developer, you immediately see a way to automate the process.

So that is why I created a “Local Guides Banner” that can be used in your signature on Local Guides Connect. This is the first version, and can of course be updated with all sorts of feature requests and functionality. The first version is visible in the banner below.

At a glance you can see my level, points and some information like the number of photos and the photo views.

All the information is received from your public profile page on Google Maps.

Because of technical reasons, the information is only refreshed once every hour. But it will be immediately changed on all images in every comment (after a page reload). So after a page reload you will always see the last status.

To make it easy for everybody to add the banner to your Local Guides Connect page, I’ve created a “generator” that guides you through the process of adding this to your banner. Navigate to my website to create your own banner: https://ndsmyter.be/local-guides-banner/

The banner can be used on Local Guides Connect, but also on blogs or other websites. As long as you can enter some HTML content, you can add this banner.

I’m open for all feature requests and improvements people would like to see. But I don’t want to spend time in developing features that nobody is going to use. If you have a feature request, you can share it in this post, or create a new “issue” on Github. Possible things I could improve: colors, layout, design.

If there are other software developers with some great ideas, feel free to do a pull request on my project; it’s all open source.

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Is it update automatically?

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Hello @SayeedP ,

Yes, it will update the information at least once every hour. So it is not realtime, but the point system of Local Guides has a larger update interval than 1 hour.

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Thanks for making this. Just followed your instructions.

It does not seem to work. Your instructions said to post the code in the field just above the signature field. But that is the field holding my last name. Code is too long for that field anyways.

Any idea what could be wrong?

My data got pulled perfectly on your page. So it a problem with adding the signature.

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@ndsmyter

II gore my post above. It seems to work on the last post I just made. Wonder if it will show up under this one also.

Nope.

But here it is visible : https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t5/Idea-Exchange/Dark-Mode-for-Maps-and-Street-View/idc-p/2160161#M44472

Cheers

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@MortenCopenhagen

II can see it displayed under all of your messages. It will normally also show up under older posts, because the signatures is used there too.

So as far as I can see everything is looking good.

If you have suggestions, let me know :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi @ndsmyter

Thanks for your reply. I tried signing out from my account and searched for some of my posts. They all have your banner. Just perfect. But when signed in I only see it now and then.

Actually it is quite OK as long as it is not a malfunction.

It could be a cache thing.

Cheers and thanks again.

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Hi Nicolas ( @ndsmyter )

I’m getting more and more requests on how to add “your” banner. So I now created a macro to type this:

Check this link by my friend Nicolas De Smyter:
Adding a Local Guides Banner to your Local Guides Connect signature

Could you recommend a hack to maybe reduce the size of the banner? It seems quite (too) big sometimes.

All the best

Morten

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Hey @MortenCopenhagen ,

I’m glad to hear that there is so many interest in the banner.

To answer your question about the size:

The text that is generated, is HTML code to an image that is generated on my server. So you can use that HTML code to change the size of the image.

More specific, change the text accordingly:

From: …alt=“Generated using https://ndsmyter.be/local-guides-banner/” >

To: … height=“100” alt=“Generated using https://ndsmyter.be/local-guides-banner/”>

The part in bold will change the height of the banner to the given size. The size is in “pixels”. You can give it a couple of tries to find a good fitting size.

A height of 100px looks like this for me:

At the moment this is indeed a “hack”, so it doesn’t really look that perfect. But when I have some spare time I’ll check to improve it some more so it looks better.

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Thanks @ndsmyter

I should have been able to hack that my self…

Now others can benefit as well.

Cheers and thanks.

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Code is working before the html check by the editor on Connect. Also I disabled Grammarly plugin.

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Apparently the size is ignored completely on Local Guides Connect. So I’ll have to use a different approach to get it working. I’ll give an update here as soon as I found a way.

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Hi @ndsmyter

Performance has gone down over the past 2-3 days. The banner now takes a while to show up. It shows up but with quite a delay.

Just wanted you to know.

Cheers

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Nothing has changed server-wise, so I wouldn’t know why that is. Maybe a saturated network due to people watching Netflix etc is to blame.

Anyway, even with a saturated network, it should only be the initial load that takes a little longer, after that the image will be cached in your browser.

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Hi @ndsmyter

Now it is no longer just delayed. Some timeout or Connect gives up waiting.

Banners (including yours) now look like this:

smyter error.jpg
smyter error.jpg742×257 16.3 KB

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Apparently my server didn’t come back online after routine maintenance update. The server has been rebooted and the images are back.