Mapping a Google Sheet – reworking the Geomob events map

When Ed challenged me to make a map of Geomob Events on a podcast, I jumped in scraped the data and produced quite a nice map despite fighting a battle with Gemini to extract the data for the map from the markdown files of the Geomob website. The problem, as Ed pointed out retrospectively was that the events map was going to be difficult to maintain as further events got scheduled, it was very much a snapshot at a point in time and my suggestion that someone could edit the json file of events was not very practical. Ideally the map needed to auto-update when a new event was added or the details of an event were changed but that would mean detecting changes to the markdown and updating the events file accordingly – that might be possible but it felt complicated and open to errors, I wanted a simpler solution. I thought that a non technical interface to add/update event details that connected to the map might be the way to go. I wondered whether a Google Sheet might be a way to do this,…