Ken Hughes

I have completed stage one of GeoRss enabling dasBlog.

In the config page I added some options for enabling GeoRss, specifying a default lat/long and enabling ‘integration’ with Google maps. There is also an option to use the default lat/long for any non geocoded posts.

If GeoRss is enabled then the edit entry screen provides textboxes to allow specifying lat/long (populated with defaults from config page).

If the google maps integration is enabled then you’ll get the ‘Show Map’ button and clicking it will display a map which you can move around until you find the location and then click on the location to get the lat/long texboxes populated.

If you have existing non geocoded posts then you can have the default lat/long added to those if you wish.

I puzzled around for ages when trying to display the georss in google (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=yourfeedaddress) – it kept telling me that the feed was invalid. I eventually found that feedburner was adding <atom10:link blah blah /> to the xml which for some reason google maps thinks is invalid. The only way I could find to prevent feedburner adding the atom link was to turn OFF the ‘Browser Friendly’ feature in feedburner.

So – stage 2…

The work I still want to do with this is basically to add macros to get lat/long  – fairly easy I guess, and then some way to specify lat/long from Windows Live Writer (and other offline blog clients) – a little more complex. Scott mentioned a geo microformat and from my initial looks seems to be a good route to take – watch this space…  

Now it is simply a case of retrofitting the geo info into all my old posts…