Today, in a matter of minutes, I wrote a really simple markdown web environment in PHP. It’s nothing complicated by any stretch of the imagination, but for me at least it’ll be quite useful.
Archive for April, 2006
GeoRSS is an extension of RSS that incorporates geographic data (i.e. latitude/longitude coordinates). This is useful for plotting any data that might need to be placed on a map.
While building out the reviewsby.us map, I decided to use the Yahoo! Maps API versus the Google Maps API because I wanted to gain some familiarity with another API.
It was worth trying Yahoo!’s API. First of all, reviewsby.us has addresses for restaurants and Yahoo! provides a simple Geocoding REST service. This made it easy for me to convert street addresses to latitude and longitude pairs (even though this wasn’t required as we’ll soon see).[1] The real selling point of Yahoo! was the [GeoRSS] functionality. I can extend an RSS feed (which [symfony] generates quite easily) to add latitude or longitude points (or even the street address), direct my Yahoo! map to the feed and voila, all the locations in that feed are now on the map, and when I click on them, the RSS item is displayed. That cut down on a lot of development time.
