Whoot!

Excuse the mess, we're rebuilding.

I've finally taken some time to clean up the code, optimize some slow paths, implement some new features. The site was unusable or even down for a few days while the database had a massage and the new foundation was being put in.

Leigh Dodds made a super neat GeoURL to Google Maps converter using the RSS feeds. Thanks Leigh, that's awesome! :-)

Thanks for the suggestions for the lat/long coding in the RSS feeds by the way. I'll add some of the more "standard ways"...

I haven't picked a license (have to check that with Joshua first too), but the code ended up in an unrestricted subversion repository recently, so I might as well tell where. Beware that it's not "open source", so no using the code to setup your own site. Actually, you can't even take snippets of the code and copy it into your own systems. (Yet). That being said, it is at:

svn co http://svn.develooper.com/projects/geourl/trunk/ geourl

Before adding any new features, I'd like to get the outstanding bugs tackled first. (For example there's a bug that makes the /near/ page not show other weblogs at exactly your location).

If there's interest, I'll setup a mailing list for this...

I've added license conditions on the site. The link is at the bottom of each page. Practically this applies mostly to the RSS feeds.

It's a creative commons license, so I've added the CC XML markup to all the pages.

On popular request I've updated the rss feeds to include latitude and longitude data.

I added with two extra fields as in the following data. Suggestions for better ways to do it are welcome. (Accordingly this is subject to change at any moment! :-) )

Please let me know if you do anything with this.

(Another change I did last week was adding Google Maps links to pages for sites in England and Ireland. Let me know if this is not working right for you of if you have more suggestions for maps)

I get asked about this a couple of times a day, "where are the RSS feeds?!"

I wanted to add some sorting options, an Atom feed and have it available in a sidebar (see the previous entry) before announcing it, so take this as an early preview announcement you get because everyone is asking. :-)

You can add ";format=rss10" to get the /near result in RSS 1.0 format or ";format=rss092" to get it in RSS 0.92 format. For example to get a feed of things near Jim use this URL: http://geourl.org/near/?p=http://trainedmonkey.com/;format=rss10

The old /rss10/ URLs from v1.0 are also working (they redirect to the new).

As mentioned I'm going to add an Atom feed and also make the old XML feed work again (with more data than the RSS feed).

For someone with a bit of CSS magic:

Patrick H. Lauke (recenter) made a "GeoURL backwards" Firefox extension. If you install it, it'll light up a little GeoURL globe when the page you are on has ICBM headers. If you click the globe you get sent to see a list of sites nearby. It's really clever.

You can install it by clicking here: http://www.splintered.co.uk/extensions/geourl_0.2.xpi

update - It's now listed on addons.mozilla.org

update - someone else made another 1.5 extension.

Firefox will show a warning at the top of the screen, to proceed click "Edit options" and then "Allow" in the dialog that comes up. That'll make Firefox trust Patrick's site. Click "OK" and then click on the link to the extension again. When the extension has been installed you have to restart Firefox and then get the extension active in the toolbar by going to the menu "View" - "Toolbars" - "Customize" and then drag the GeoURL icon up to the toolbar. Whee, that was a lot of work. But try it, you'll like it.

update - Mark Zeman made a flickr world map extension based on the GeoURL extension.

Thorsten Sommer and Jason Pettus told me a few days ago telling the trackback URLs on the weblog wasn't working. It should work now. Judging from the logs I "missed" one or two hundred trackbacks. Oops.

Also: after you do a ping you should get a few more options for buttons (in 80×15 instead of just the strange 52×14 format).

update - eek, until I get around to install the Trackback moderation I'm going to disable that again. On my regular weblog I get very little trackback spam; but over here there's no end of it.

Some days ago someone (I can't find the mail now, sorry!) pointed out to me how to link to Google Maps by lat/long, so I added links to Google Maps from pages centered around a US site.

Today Laust Ladefoged (recenter) pointed out to me that MultiMap has maps for (almost?) all of the world, so I've added MultiMap links to all pages now.

If you know of a good map service (even if only for your country) that I can link to with lat/long coordinates, please let me know. To make it more likely I'll get around to it, please provide as much information as possible about the parameters required (sometimes the lat/longs are x100 or x1000 for example) and which countries are covered. Thanks!