If you're an avid Foursquare user you can already display your last checkin, visualised on a map, in the sidebar of your WordPress powered site with the WP Quadratum plugin. Foursquare, checkins and maps ... what more could you ask for? Maybe the answer is more maps.

Version 1.1 of the WP Quadratum plugin, which went live this morning, now has added maps. The previous versions of the plugin used Nokia's maps, because I work for Nokia's Location & Commerce group and I wanted to use the maps that I work on. But if Nokia's maps aren't the maps for you then how about Google's, or maybe CloudMade's OpenStreetMap maps or perhaps OpenLayers' OpenStreetMap maps.

It's a glaringly obvious oversight but a few month's back I realised that given what I do for a living, there's something missing from my blog and that something is a map.

There's a whole slew of "where am I" style WordPress plugins out there, but after some careful research I decided that none of them did precisely what I wanted, which was to show the last check-in I made on Foursquare, on a map, in the sidebar of my blog.

Those that did come close still didn't do the key thing I wanted and that was to use the map I work on as part of my day job. Now don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the maps that I could have used; Google, Bing, Mapquest and OpenStreetMap produce very fine maps and they all have the JavaScript API I'd need to display my last checkin. But none of them used my map and that means a Nokia Map.