In an earlier post we looked at how you can add live Web cams to your map using the live Old Faithful cam at Yellowstone National Park. Continuing with that theme, let's look at how we can add some of the animated media found at the Park Web site to our map.

First, let's zoom to the boundary around Yellowstone National Park. We found the boundary for Yellowstone National Park at the NPS Data clearinghouse and downloaded it as a shapefile. Then added it to our

We added a point note, placing it in the middle of the Park. The note popup automatically opens in edit mode, and we've already changed the title.

Now let's go to the Yellowstone Web site. We found a link on the left of the main page titled Nature & Science which we followed, eventually taking us to the hotspot page with hot spot theories and some really spiffy flash animations.

All we need to do is copy the URL of this page and paste it in our note.

That was easy, and worked out great. And here's how it looks.

But what we wanted was just the animation. The Park site doesn't provide a direct link, so in this case it's a little more of challenge to grab just the Flash animation. So we had to do a little investigation and use a little HTML and Web site knowledge. Here's how we figured it out.

First we right-clicked on the page to view it's source, and found the spot in the document where the flash animation is referenced. It was in the midst of  another set of code to launch the flash player, and here is what that looked like.

Now the path, highlighted in yellow above, is relative, so we had to figure out what the public URL would be to the animation. Looking at the URL to the main Park site, we could figure it out pretty easily. Here is the URL to the main page.

So we just added the root of the URL above to the relative path in the URL we found in the page code.

Then we just pasted everthing including the EMBED tags into our note.

And here's the final result - just what we wanted, just the Flash animation in our popup.

It's easy to use HTML in popups to do very interesting things.