People are passionate about where they live. At Etsy we need to keep track of lots of different locations, such as buyers' billing and shipping addresses and sellers' shop locations. As Etsy continues to expand internationally we wanted to provide better localization and translations for our location place names. We determined that the best way to effect this change was to move from using a closed location API provider to internal services backed by the open GeoNames data set.

The post details some of the steps in the process including the mapping of the current data to the new structure (the script is available on github). They talk about how they mapped their old data over (trial and error sometimes) and the creation of a database of "GeoNameIDs" for each customer in their records. They've also implemented a Lucene/Solr search for improved searching and auto-suggestion based on the user's location.

In this article, we're going to learn how to work with the framework as a whole by writing a real-world application: making a module, controller, routes, templates (views) and services. In order to achieve this we are will use the Foursquare API, and APC for caching the API lookups. We will plot venues from Foursquare in Google Maps for display.

They help you set up a skeleton application and start on creating the "Foursquare Module" along with its controller and views. There's Javascript code included to use the Google Maps functionality and a simple class to work with the FourSquare API to get nearby venues. In the end, you'll have a basic application that maps out the points automatically.

The web is a place where everyone is in your backyard. This can be both a blessing and a curse. How do you know where your website traffic is coming from and how much of it there is? [...] How was traffic led to your website in the first place and why? How long do people stick around and what do they like the most about your site? These are all some of the many questions you can answer with web analytic software, but the real question is why would you want to answer these questions at all and what's the best way to look at the answer?

[...] If we look at a heat map it's easier to spot where the majority of our visitors and traffic are coming from, geographically. It also helps us understand that people visiting a virtual space can, and will, be physically located in different parts of the world.

He includes the steps to recreate a map like the one included in this page showing the current view statistics on his site. He uses a MySQL backend to store the GeoIP data and parses out the Apache "access_log" to get the IPs of the visiting users. He then runs these against the GeoIP data and passes this country data on to Google's visualization for handling. He also recommends using the tools offered by the Google Webmaster Tools to further enhance your introspection into your site's visitors.

The first article in this mini-series on creating geolocation apps with the backend hosted in Windows Azure Websites is going to be a walkthrough of the PHP code that we'll host in Windows Azure. The PHP site will be simple and expose just a few methods. Prior to getting into the code for the service, we need to setup a new website in Windows Azure and set up our database.

He walks you through some of the initial steps to create the PHP side of things - setting up the website instance and database, downloading the Silex PHP framework and the PHP code to get process the latitude and longitude of the current user. Also included is code to help find "interesting" points near the user and code to allow the user to add their own.

The challenge then is to do two things: work out what place you could be talking about, disambiguate if necessary, and then identify exactly where on Earth that is. That's what I'll show you how to do in this article; by using a freely available web service, we'll write a simple program to ask users where they are (and ask them to clarify if necessary) before identifying their responses in concrete terms.

He shows how to make a request to the Placemaker web service, passing it a string coming from the user, to be located. The POST request contains a few pieces of data including an application ID , your desired output type and the language you're using for the input. His example code uses curl to make the request and handles it (the XML response at least) with a call to simplexml_load_string.

Location-aware applications rely on being able to locate where you are, and this is what geolocation is all about. After all, once the application knows your location, it can go on to find the nearest store, guide you through the appropriate route to a destination, or target relevant advertisements to you. Geolocation, then, is simply the mechanism for identifying your geographical location.

He mentions two challenges associated with geolocation - finding where someone is and describing the location. With Geonames, he shows how to call the service's "findNearbyPlaceName" method to find the closest "place" to a given latitude/longitude combination. Included is a bit of sample PHP to connect to the service and Javascript to request the user's current location.

I like taking pictures, and I usually take a GPS so that I can place them on a map on my Flickr page. On my last excursion however, the battery of my GPS had died, so I did not have location information available to store in my pictures' EXIF headers. Flickr can use the EXIF headers to then show the images on the map. Because I did not have the location information to automatically place my pictures on the map, I wanted to do that by hand.

His script (as used by a local Squid proxy) supports two different versions of the mapping - one for Yahoo! Maps and the other for OpenStreetMaps'. You can see the end result here - a set of Flickr images with a map in the background.

Services that allow users to identify nearby points of interest continue to grow in popularity. I'm sure we're all familiar with social websites that let you search for the profiles of people near a postal code, or mobile applications that use geolocation to identify Thai restaurants within walking distance. [...] The first step is to obtain the latitude and longitude coordinates of any locations you want to make searchable.

He talks about why postal code-based location isn't the best option, a web service (like Geocoder.ca for Canadians) could provide more accurate results. He includes code you can use to help search the data based off of two formulas - one to grab the larger area of locations and the other to filter them down into the closest. Finally, he shows how to use the Geolocation API service to get the results based on the user's search parameters.

This Geolocation Plugin will be a nice addition for people who do travel blogging or who write about things in a particular area (restaurant and business reviews, hyperlocal news, etc).

The power of this plugin comes when you're using a device with a GPS in it (like an iPhone) that can feed the information into the plugin. The result is a link that users can hover over and get a map of the location.