Mapping Hacks

Set Up an OpenGuide for Your Hometown #97

Chapter 9, Mapping with Other People

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HACK

Adding latitude and longitude—available, for example, from the efficient

http://www.streetmap.co.uk/—allows OpenGuides to provide a “search for

nearby places” option on each page, which shows geocoded pages of nearby

places. OpenGuides also makes a decent attempt to geocode postcodes.

Some international sites do this differently; the Open Guide to San Fran-

cisco (http://sf.openguides.org) has been adapted to look up street addresses

using the free geocoder service at http://geocoder.us/.

[Hack #79] has more infor-

mation on how this is done.

Think about what kinds of categories of things, and what kind of neighbor-

hoods, you want your OpenGuide to talk about. Inevitably people will cre-

ate all manner of weird ad hoc categories on their own (this is a wiki after

all), but a bit of “wiki gardening” will give people some direction.

OpenGuides has an active and helpful developer community. You can find

their contact details on http://openguides.org/. They are prepared to host

individual OpenGuides for people who don’t have access to a web server

and will also delegate DNS subdomains under openguides.org to new Open-

Guides upon request.

Make Maps of Your OpenGuide

As your OpenGuide expands, you’ll probably want to see a map illustrating

the scope of your virtual terrain. Luckily, the OpenGuides software gives

you a ...