Blog Posts on a Map?

Why not?

(Thanks goes to Robbie for setting this up!)

32 thoughts on “Blog Posts on a Map?

  1. OMG Robbie, you have way too much time on your hands. 🙂

    Question 1: this is just based on the number of people who post on raincityguide, not the number of blogs per person, correct? So for example, one person gets one count in your dbase. If your name is Ardell and you blog daily, you still only get counted as one blogger, is this correct?

    Question 2: How do you know where someone is located?

    Thanks.

  2. Jillayne,

    It’s actually a little different than I think you assume.

    On each blog post, there is an “address” field that has to be manually filled in. If an contributor posts about a place, city, neighborhood, etc., then I add an address to the post. It is those addresses that you are seeing on the map (not the location of the authors).

    Hope that helps!

    -Dustin

  3. Dustin,

    I love it. This is really a great page. Is it something you custom built? Can it be reproduced easily. I would love to have a map like that on our website that tied to post on our blog.

    Great job, very innovative.

  4. We did the following in order to pull it off…

    1. I believe Dustin used the GeoPress plugin for WordPress in order to associate a latitude / longitude w/ a blog post
    2. Dustin granted my server access firewalled access to his server
    3. I wrote some code read all the geocoded blog posts from RCG’s WordPress MySQL DB
    4. I wrote some code to put raindrops on a virtual earth map

    The toughest part is that you need access to some server side programming framework like PHP, asp.net, or whatever you prefer to read the database. If you have that, it’s a “simple matter of writing the code”.

  5. Hey Robbie and Dustin,

    I have two “techie thingie” observations. Yeah, I guess hell IS freezing over.

    1) I love the sites that have a real words like banana or carrot as comment identifiers, instead of squigly letters and numbers waving at me.

    Shoot…there was something I wanted to ask Robbie. Oh well, can’t keep those techie things in my head. I’ll have to jot it down on the wall so he sees it at the “Holiday Party”…date coming soon.

  6. Dustin,

    I can tell you an example. Greg Swann added the “verification” thing and he has easy to read numbers, except there’s a white line drawn through the middle of them, which sometimes makes some of the numbers hard to define. Blogger (I think it’s blogger) has crazy mixed uppe rand lower case letters with numbers mixed in and all squiggly and scrip and hard to read.

    Active Rain has Words! Real live words! like banana and carrot and celery. Easy to read. No lines drawn threw them. No squigleys. It’s the word you have to enter in the box before you can post a comment, so it knows you aren’t a spam comment robot.

  7. Ahhh…

    I was thinking you were talking about avatars! I was thinking of adding one of those to RCG, but the reality is that I don’t end up with much spam EXCEPT when Akismet goes down (It has only happened twice in this past year!).

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