In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Duncan Barclay
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
There has been a lot of talk about adding geographical data to the BBC
RSS feeds recently, with many people saying that it isn't possible to
do it in a way that isn't manual. I agree that it isn't 100% accurate
doing it automatically, but I have found that it is possible to do it
reasonably accurately.
Yes, that's right. I made another prototype :).
It can be found at http://backstage.min-data.co.uk/geotagged/
This is looking really good - definitely getting somewhere with it.
A few years ago, I did this:
http://www.local-news.net/go/-0.193/51.601/
(I sold the domain a few months ago, but the site appears to still be
working and unchanged)
This approached the problem the other way round. You give the site a
latitude & longitude (in the URL), it looks up the nearest place name
that it knows, then queries Yahoo News with a search query based on that
location.
Of course, Yahoo News searches can be outputted directly as RSS, so the
rest is easy. Although it's still not entirely accurate of course.
The major difference between this and your prototype is that
local-news.net only displays news from one place at a time. If you
wanted to do something similar with GMaps, you'd probably:
1. Look up the location of the centre of the map.
2. Check the local cache to see if there's already data for that
location, and if not, search, grab and cache it.
3. Check the cache again for other local places that already have news
cached.
4. Combine 2 & 3 into an XML feed for the Google Map.
That way, you're only ever doing a maximum of 1 external query each time
someone moves the map, but you gather data on more places as people move
the map around.
I'm doing something similar with the new weather forecast stuff on my
own prototype:
http://www.dynamite.co.uk/local/?feed=feedWeatherChannel.php
Dom
