Insert Geo Microformat Plugin for Windows Live Writer

I have just completed a new Windows Live Writer plugin. This extension allows ease insertion of geo microformat information.

It allows the user to easily choose the location they want to insert (in microformat) from a Virtual Earth map and also configure how it is displayed (if at all on the post.

Recently I (with considerable help from Alexander Groß) added GeoRss support for dasBlog. The co-ordinates can be specified when adding a post via the web interface. This plugin is stage two of this support, stage three will be parsing the geo microformat when a post is added and using that to populate the GeoRss info.

The end goal being to allow the geo info to be entered when creating a post in Writer and having that info available in GeoRss format in the feed.

I started this plugin with the view to using Google Maps, however they require that you get an API key and that key is only valid for a particular web site / URL path. This foiled my plans to embed the map in a Windows Forms WebBrowser control (I did look at producing an html page that was served from my web site, and using it embedded in the WebBrowser – not scaleable and too much configuration for a normal user to do.

I hadn’t looked in depth at Virtual Earth, but recently went to MixUK:07 and saw a couple of demos / presentations on it – a quick look found that it didn’t need a API and was not tied to a particular URL / path – the JavaScript for it is pretty similar to the one for Google Maps so learning curve was pretty short. The only issue I have with http://local.live.com is that there is no (currently) facility to enter a GeoRss feed in the search query and just display the data (the current method of displaying this kind of data is to embed a map in your own pages and use their API to display the items as a ‘collection’).

You can get the installer for it here InsertGeoFormatSetup.msi (325Kb).

GEO 51.4043243116043:-1.28760516643523