Chris Heilmann recently released a greasemonkey script to Geo locate WordPress posts. The script uses the recently released Yahoo Placemaker API together with YQL. I was really impressed by the simplicity and power of YQL. I enhanced the script and ported it into a WordPress Plugin named Geo Mark, which can be used in any browser.
Geo Mark WordPress Plugin
Geo Mark will automatically locate Geo information in your WordPress posts using Yahoo Placemaker and YQL API’s. Once the Geo location is located, it will add this information as custom fields to the post. The information stored in the custom field can be displayed anywhere in the post using the build in get_post_meta() function. The Plugin also exposes template functions which can be used to generate GEO Microformats based on the location information found in the post.
Geo enabled RSS feeds
The Geo Mark Plugin also lets you to expose the location based information in RSS feeds. The Geo information stored in the custom field can be used to create Geo tags in the RSS feed. The Plugin supports the following Geo RSS formats as shown in the screenshot.
- Simple (georss:point)
- GML (gml:pos)
- W3C (geo:lat)
Why Geo marking posts is important
Adding Geo information to posts has lot of benefits. It enables data mining for location and also enables you to display information about the post on a map.
If you are still not convinced then checkout the posts by Chris.
PS: By the way, as recommended by Ozh I am going to submit this Plugin for the WordPress Plugin Competition. You can vote for this Plugin at the WordPress Plugin Competition blog.