Re: [Slashcode-development] [Slashcode-general] GeoRSS and Google Maps API Plugins for Slash

[shane <sh...@lo...>]

On Aug 29, 2006, at 10:16 AM, Larson, Timothy E. wrote:

> shane wrote:
>> On Aug 25, 2006, at 4:59 PM, Larson, Timothy E. wrote:
>>> I'd've been happy with a even a list of regions/countries to choose
>>> from when submitting stories.  How hard is it to reliably map any
>>> given coordinate pair to a city/country/state/area?  I can certainly
>>> see the utility in finding local postings (i.e. "within 200 km of
>>> <coord>") but more likely (for my needs) I'd want to focus on
>>> "Canada" or "Manhattan" or "Middle East".  It certainly would be
>>> easier (for non-geography buffs) to submit something like this (i.e.
>>> picking from a list, clicking a map region) with stories rather than
>>> coordinate pairs.
>>
>> Where would one obtain such data?
>
> It would have to be defined somewhere on the site, but that would be
> done by the admins during setup, and only once.  If this GeoRSS  
> thing is
> that big already, I imagine someone somewhere has already done some of
> the work: defining the boundaries of countries, states, cities,
> landmasses, etc.  You'd just have to pick the ones that work for you,
> and fill in the gaps.

We may have a stop gap here -

http://www.lottadot.com/projman.pl?op=view&id=15

I had started that zipcode plugin, well, a very long time ago. As far  
as I recall, it was functional last time I messed with it. If you  
can, take a look at it, specifically the schema and the data it  
contains. From a quick glance, it looks like it has lat/long  
information by zip/city/state.

However, defining boundaries w/ landmasses et all, er yuk.

>
>>> So this only applies to RSS, and you won't notice anything when
>>> visiting the site otherwise?
>>
>> No. If a story has geo-data associated with it, it'll show a map.
>> Example:
>>
>> http://industry.slashgeo.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/27/1337233
>>
>> It will also add tags into the html such as
>>
>> <meta name="geo.position" content="51.5;-0.1">
>>
>> For more info on the tags: http://www.lottadot.com/projman.pl?
>> op=viewissue&id=5
>
> Very very very cool.  Especially if the map view is customizable.

The maps are drawn via a template. The template expects certain  
things passed to it (map api key, lat, long, points) But other then  
that, it will be very, very highly mod'able.

>
>>> If the story has location info, I'd want to see it in the story
>>> somewhere.
>>
>> Where? And what? That's been the big question.
>
> That depends on the nature of the site.  A "hard news" site would  
> prefix
> "Dateline: New York" to the story submission, perhaps.
>
>>> I think it would be a huge value-add, and very useful, especially
> were
>>> it given the ability to use "general" location as well as "specific"
>>> location.
>>
>> In what way? To search the stories? To filter them on an index view
>> (as you could filter by author, or by topic?)
>
> Precisely!  That was my original vision for how it would work in that
> low-pri request.  It would be a fourth piece of data along with topic,
> section, and author.  One would be able to filter the homepage on
> location just as with those three.
>
> In fact, 699047 describes an enhancement to home page customization  
> that
> would make use of this field.  Since that request, a different
> enhancement has been done, but the idea of using locale is still cool.
> On slashdot, for example, sure it's interesting that some big business
> 10 timezones away is switching operations to Linux, but I'm also
> interested in the much less earthshaking news of an Open Software
> Festival sponsored by a high school club in the next county.  By  
> adding
> support for location, big sites can still cover local news without
> "spamming" the non-locals.

How would this be any different from having a topic-nexus defined  
that would hold all stories associated with a certain area?

Then all a user has to do is hit the URL for skin to obtain that  
content.

I bring that solution up, because that doesn't entail modifying any  
source code, nor schema. So far, to get the functionality that's  
mentioned on the project homepage ( http://lottadot.com/projects/ 
slashmaps ) I've not had to modify all that much source code to get  
these things to work. Mostly we're using topic_nexus_extras to store  
the information, and modified templates to show it. (I did have to  
complete the skins editor, and the skins_params, but that's another  
topic).

Inorder for one to be able to essentially search by story.location  
(let's assume that's what it's called) efficiently, at first thought  
I would think we'd have to modify the stories table schema, add that  
column, and then modify all the story code (getStoriesEssentials,etc)  
in Slash.pm as well as retool a bit of Slash::Search. Then add a bit  
to the edituser page that would let them set the 'region/place'  
limiting options (just like they can exclude authors, topics).

At first glance, that seems like quite a bit of work. Maybe there'd  
be a better way to do it. Any thoughts? I'm all ears.

Another question I would have, is if you're wanting to associate a  
story with a location, how do you let a user exclude? by proximity to  
that location? how do you define proximity? lat/long? within XX  
miles? but that's US, so you'd want to investigate using an  
alternative metric.

  Shane





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