PublisherDev

Geo location of places

ulrich — Fri, 07 May 2010 21:11:56 +0000

Recently I updated JudoWorldMap.com with country markers. First when I tried to add the markers to the map I realized I did not have the slightest idea where to put the marker. You can’t just average out between all markers of the country, because you could end up in a spot belonging to another country. And there are probably many people who would mind seeing their soil occupied by foreign flags. Even if it’s only on JudoWorldMap.com. But then I found that Google provides a nice geolocation api for addresses and it can be given only a country name. Google will return a latitude/longitude for a point somewhere in the country.

That prblem solved I started to look at even more specific places like major cities. My first few tries in Google search were really futile but when I found a wikipedia list of “cities by latitude” and “cities by longitude” it all started to come together. Finally I found geonames.org. What a great resource for exactly what I was looking for, the geo location of major cities all around the world. And the data is shared under a Creative Commons license. What more can you ask for?

Address information in XML

ulrich — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:58:14 +0000

As it turns out there is a standard RFC 5139 for address information in XML data. That is probably a good way to go for including that kind of information in Atom feeds. More on that shortly.

Atom + GeoRSS

ulrich — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:18:50 +0000

Out of sheer need I extended FeedWriter to support GeoRSS. While doing so I realised it lacked support for many tags from the Atom standard. I am a big fan of the IETF and their standards process. And of course I immediately thought about a full featured Atom feed writer for PHP. We’ll see how this goes. Stay tuned!