Geotagging blog posts
Does anyone know if there is a way to add geotags into blog posts via any of the weblog API’s?
Another thing that we need to figure out is how to add those tags into blog RSS feeds. The goal is to get Planet to become aware of the location of each post, so we can create a map of them.
I found this plugin that does something what I want, but there’s still some research to be done to make this work..
Edit: Looks like the above mentioned GeoRSS plugin for Wordpress actually does encode the coordinates to the feeds, which is neat. Now, does anyone know a way to actually adding the location information in the first place, by using a blog API that Gnome Blog can use? There’s a nice UI in Wordpress web editor itself, that can be used to set location, but I want GeoClue to set it automatically for me.
October 8th, 2006 at 20:59
What would be a good start is to lobby LiveJournal to add them. It already has a “current location” field, but that’s not exported to RSS.
October 9th, 2006 at 01:40
Glad you found GeoPress - I was going to suggest it until I saw your edit.
It doesn’t currently handle posting locations through any of the API’s. This is something we’re going to add in the future.
GeoClue looks neat. It doesn’t mention any geolocation techniques such as by-ip, wifi, or other.
And just let me know if you have any other requests or ideas!
October 9th, 2006 at 10:14
If I read the MetaWeblog API spec correctly, we can just extend the “post struct” (associative array) to contain a “georss:point” element:
“The defined members of struct are the elements of in RSS 2.0, providing a rich variety of item-level metadata, with well-understood applications.
…
The server must ignore all elements that it doesn’t understand. ”
http://www.xmlrpc.com/metaWeblogApi#theStruct
BTW, please keep other systems than just WordPress in mind when making the GeoClue specifications and prototypes. There are some other Geospatial CMSs available out there…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geospatial_Content_Management_System
October 9th, 2006 at 14:53
Andrew, I actually mailed to the “send mail to geopress developers” -address in the website
Anyway, you can check out the code from the svn in the end of the geoclue page on the wiki - we currently have three backends in mind: GPSD (talks to gps devices directly), plazes.com and “user set location”. Plazes.com does this network recognition thing - I would be happy to know of any other methods since plazes requires an account etc.
In any case the whole point of geoclue is that it combines the many possible backends into one simple system service on Linux that then is easy to use by any application.
Like a friend of mine said, “I want to make the weather applet always show the weather for the place I am in”.
October 15th, 2006 at 12:25
Hey there,
I get a message about the “Google Maps API key used here being registered for a different website” blabla. Could you fix that, please?
November 6th, 2006 at 08:12
Here is a link to a blog post I did about geotagging my blog posts. It’s not exactly automated, but it is pretty cool. It also talks about geotagging photos with Garmin GPS data and Picasa.
http://hikesandbikes.blogspot.com/2006/10/life-of-geolocated-blog-post.html