Way back in 2006, when Mashups and AJAX were relatively new (well, at least from today's perspective...), I wanted to give these techniques a try and started with the "hello world" of mashup programming: Show geolocated data on Google Maps. And the easiest source for such data was and still is earthquake data.
The first version of the Earthquake Mashup was a simple map showing a single data source from the USGS. I soon added more data feeds from the European counterpart EMSC-CSEM and the German GFZ. With the addition of a timeline widget developed for MIT's SIMILE Widgets project, the mashup was completed. Since 2013 it was available at
Although I had to adapt the mashup a few times to changing APIs and move it from one hosting provider to another, the Earthquake Mashup essentially ran from 2006 to 2023 without any major interruptions. Not bad in WWW time, I think...
In 2016 Google announced that they were no longer providing Google Maps for free to web developers, and in 2018 it was mandatory to set up a billing account. Google would charge the owner of a web application, if access to Google Maps went over a certain limit. While it is okay for me to pay a small but fixed amount of money to run my servers, I had no intention to take a gamble and suddenly be in debt of an unexpected sum to Google. So I simply did nothing...
In February of 2023, a devastating earthquake hit Turkey and Syria. As in similar events before, the number of visitors to my Earthquake Mashup skyrocketed. But this time, it blew the limit for my free allowance of Google Maps usage, and Google blocked further access to their service.
Unfortunately, this is still the status quo. I had hoped Google would unblock the access after some time, but this seems not to be the case. So the Earthquake Mashup is no longer usable, at least not the way I intended it to be used.
As I have still no intention to pay Google, and I do not have the time to rewrite the mashup to use another mapping service, I have released the code to the mashup to the public - well, most of it is HTML and JavaScript, so it was not really well hidden in the first place...
As you already guessed, I have no intention to continue this project. Replacing Google Maps with e.g. OpenStreetMap is only part of the job to make the Earthquake Mashup fit for another decade or two. The timeline widget is long overdue and not working properly any more on most mobile devices. My hack for importing the RSS feeds has probably better alternatives these days. If you are a web developer in search for a weekend project: Don't hesitate, go ahead, this is your project now.
The core of the Earthquake Mashup consists of the files eqmashup.html,
eqmashup.js and eqmashup.css. In addition, you need the directories
icons and icons_exp in the same directory on your web server.
If you want to recreate the icons, you can use the Shell script
mkicons.sh and mkicons_exp.sh. You will need the programs
xfig (more precisely fig2dev) and the
NetPBM tools. They will convert
the template icon.fig into various versions.
The code for the SIMILE Timeline widget used to be hosted on MIT's
servers, but changed home a few times. Download the latest version
(2.3.1) from the developer's Git
repository and place it in
/simile-widgets/timeline/2.3.1/ on your web server.
In order to deal with the same-origin policy
(SOP), my solution
in 2006 was to proxy the RSS feeds from the USGS and other providers
through my own web server. httpd-fragment.txt contains some Rewrite
rules for the Apache web server, they are probably easily adapted for
other servers like nginx.