I second Geokit, I've used it in almost every application I've built. However, the main purpose of geokit is for getting the latitude and longitude of a location and then performing distance calculations between that location and other locations (such as finding all locations within a certain distance of another location).
If you want to do something such as list cities or counties, you'll probably need to get something like a 'location database' and slice and dice it for your needs. Unfortunately they usually cost money. An alternative solution to showing all the articles in the same county as a city would be to use geokit to show all the articles within a certain distance of a city. That could provide your users with a similar experience. Hope that helps. On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Billee D. <[email protected]> wrote: > > You may or may not have seen this too, but it is a big part of every > geocoding Rails app I build: > > http://geokit.rubyforge.org/ > > It adds a number of geocode-specific methods to ActiveRecord which > allow you to query records based on their proximity to a location > (e.g. @locations = Location.find(:all, :origin => @address, :within => > @within, :order => 'distance')). It can also automatically geocode a > location upon create using either Google, Yahoo, or GeoNames. You > provide your API key and GeoKit handles the grunt work. Very handy > tool. :-) > > Good luck with your project. > > On Aug 23, 7:54 am, Peter Laurens <[email protected]> > wrote: > > This is a broad question to get me started in the right direction: > > > > I would like to provide a location-based service so that users can tag > > articles with a location (the place where the article took place), and > > search (or list) articles by location. > > > > This raises some questions: > > > > - Presumably best practice is to allow the user not to type free-form > > locations, but to help them pick a location from a list? > > > > - Are there any frameworks that handle geographical hierarchies? For > > example, an article may be tagged with a city name, and a user may want > > to list all articles for a county, we'd need to know all of the cities > > in each county or we'd return nothing. > > > > The simplest thing may be to just have a flat list of places, with no > > hierarchy, a list of cities and major towns for example? > > > > Any broad advice on what's out there to provide any > > geographical/location services would be much appreciated! > > > > Thanks! > > -- > > Posted viahttp://www.ruby-forum.com/. > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
