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Dec
23rd

Is Your Site, Blog, or Feed Geotagged?

Posted in Blogging, Development, GIS by User ImageDouglas Karr at 10:35 pm

One cool way of finding sites is geographically. I actually found that a friend of mine at work had a blog by locating him on a map. There are a number of web sites out there where you can post your blog’s location or site’s location by it’s geographic coordinates. However, you’ll need to actually add some meta tags to your site to be found.

I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but there really wasn’t a simple tool out there to build the tags for me… until now! Tonight I’ve launched Address Fix.

The site can be used to clean up addresses, find your latitude and longitude, and automatically generate geotags for your website, blog and/or their RSS feeds.

Here’s a preview:
Address Fix

Just copy and paste the meta tags in the header of your website or blog with your other meta tags. Hope you like it!

Feedburner also allows you to Geotag your RSS feed. You can copy and paste your latitude and longitude into Feedburner under Optimize - Geotag your feed.

RSS feed | Trackback URI

24 Comments »

Comment by no imageRoudyBob (SezWho)
2006-12-23 23:23:17

Cool idea - nice implementation. Just where do you find the time!?
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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2006-12-23 23:26:01

Thanks, RoudyBob. My kids are at their Mom’s for Christmas… that leaves bachelor Doug and his computer! I have a lot of projects like this that were started and never finished. It will be a productive week!
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Comment by no imageRich G. (SezWho)
2006-12-24 00:44:03

OK. This is great. Thank you.
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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2006-12-24 01:53:18

Thanks, Rich!
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Comment by no imageseanrox (SezWho)
2006-12-24 02:46:13

Very cool Doug. Always working on something :)
I noticed some of your CSS is a little funny and the application doesn’t render the same in all browsers.

Also, be sure to read the Google Map API terms of service as they recently made some changes which could effect your new site.

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Comment by no imageAbhijit Nadgouda (SezWho)
2006-12-24 11:48:54

I always read and thought about it, but never came around doing it. A nice idea and a good tool.
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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2006-12-24 12:01:56

I have been keeping track of Google. Believe it or not, their maps are stil beta. If you want to build an application off of it and have guaranteed up-time, they offer an enterprise licensed version.

I met with quite a few of their team out in Mountain View last year and the love seeing tools like this so I’m not too worried about it. It’s not like I’m going to hit their thresholds with hits!

As for the CSS, I hacked an IE only CSS in there. It’s all good. I know that’s not the best method, but IE sucks so bad that I really don’t put much effort into it anymore. I realize that may be lost viewers… but oh well.

Go Firefox!

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2006-12-25 23:46:06

Update: I fixed some bugs that were returning some foreign addresses with no data. I still have an issue with returning the city if in Canada but I’m working on it!
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Comment by no imageMijke (SezWho)
2007-01-03 18:20:25

Verry cool

Mike from Germany

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Comment by no imageBrian Andressen (SezWho)
2007-01-05 11:42:05

Very nice!
Feel free to drop by and list your site at http://www.gmapsdirectory.com

Best,

Brian A.
Editor
Gmaps Directory
http://www.gmapsdirectory.com

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2007-01-05 19:39:05

Thanks, Brian! I just put it up tonight!

Regards,
Doug

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Comment by no imageMartin (SezWho)
2007-01-10 09:20:15

Tried it with my address in Norway, and only got a “Sorry” message. For fun I tried entering simply “Norway”. I had to laugh when I got the result :)

Thanks! (and no sarcasm there!)

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Comment by no imagemapperz (SezWho)
2007-01-27 12:49:29

Good for North America, but doe not support UK.

Could use another Geocoder for the UK that works like
http://local.google.co.uk/
works

http://local.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=10+Downing+St,+London,+Greater+London,+SW1A&sll=51.504255,-0.127673&sspn=0.01178,0.054245&ie=UTF8&z=15&ll=51.504442,-0.12763&spn=0.01178,0.054245&om=1&iwloc=addr

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2007-01-27 13:08:31

Thanks, mapperz… and great site! Do you know of any limitations to utilizing the emad geocoding engine? I may beta test with it to see how it goes. It would also enhance the functionality since I could have users query by a number of ways (phone, etc.)
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Comment by no imagemapperz (SezWho)
2007-01-27 13:40:11

Limitations are the source is not made clear. But have checked that the data is not crown copyrght (by checking codepoint (postcode data) and address point.
It is about 93% accurate across the UK.

Do you have any example RSS feeds?

Tried adding georss (.xml) to this
http://www.acme.com/GeoRSS/about.htm

Works with BBC Weather RSS

http://feeds.bbc.co.uk/weather/feeds/rss/5day/id/3366.xml

but not
http://mapperz.110mb.com/RSS/mapperz_GeoRSS.xml

mapperz

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2007-01-27 16:44:09

I believe it was a case sensitivity issue (<gml:Point> vs. <gml:point>). I’ve modified the code so it’s all <gml:Point>
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Comment by no imageignorant (SezWho)
2007-03-11 19:02:23

Is is just me or is the KML snippet not updating whenever I’m moving the marker?

Any other than this: great idea and very useful thing. I’m just misusing it heavily for drawing polygon layers (i.e. hand-coding LineString-elements) for some google maps.

Thanks.

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2007-03-11 21:01:40

Hi ignorant!

Thanks for bringing that to my attention! It’s now fixed! Abuse it all you’d like.

Regards,
Doug

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Comment by no imageRyan Updike (SezWho)
2007-04-01 20:14:23

Hello, my name is Ryan Updike. I am doing a Google Earth Project in our Geography Class that works with KML. Would you be able to help us fix or get some of the code just to turn out some of the KML code? We are trying to learn how to code point data as inputs, and then turn an output in xml code. Any advice you could give would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

Regards,
Ryan Updike

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2007-04-01 22:37:53

Sure, Ryan! I’d be glad to assist you. Check out this post as well on utilizing KML files. It’s also now accessible through the Google API to build your own site with a KML file (for a while it was only available through Google’s mapping page.
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Comment by no imagePaul Samson (SezWho)
2007-05-11 02:38:41

Yes, Very nice post. But I don’t like FeedBurner… And What is KML-file?
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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2007-05-11 05:57:03

Hi Paul, you can read about KML files in an article I wrote. It’s basically a geographic-specific file that’s written in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). There’s a sample in the post as well!
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Comment by no imageTerry Pearson (SezWho)
2007-10-03 22:45:28

This is a great tool. It is nice to find an easy to use geotagging tool like this.

I wish there were a directory of sites that use geotagging. Does anybody know of a list?

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Comment by no imageDouglas Karr (SezWho)
2007-10-04 07:12:16

Thanks Terry!

There is Feedmap. I’ve not seen too much action on the site in quite a while, though.

Cheers!
Doug

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