So far, we've accessed data from Flickr, saved it to a file, added it to our map and created a simple photo thumbnail style. This is pretty cool, but we really haven't done much other than just load in the data, from an OpenLayers's point of view. It's useful, but we really haven't created a full-featured web application just yet. So, let's focus on how to build a more useful web-mapping application. To do this, we'll basically need to do two general things:
Add some interactivity to our map.
Use live data. We shouldn't have to manually download a data file every time we want new data—our web application should do it automatically.
Let's focus on the first part, and then change the data source after we develop some interactivity.