Now, get this website done !

Mapped visualisation of potentialy any feed of data is made easy combining the www.geonames.com RSS to geoRSS webservice and the Yahoo!Maps API . No programming is actually needed. Just basic HTML with Javascript integration. Check out how this can be done.

First, you can first check my example of World visualisation of Reuters Headlines News . You may need to reload it if the map doesn’t show. It features news from Reuters headlines RSS feed. This RSS feed is geotagged by www.geonames.com RSS to geoRSS webservice. Yahoo Maps supports the display of this type of feeds.

What you see is what you get. A basic integration of geotagged information on a world map. Nothing else. Zooming won’t bring in any new stuff. Plus, the app seems to have problems loading correctly at first try. But on the other hand, it can be done in a matter of minutes.

First, get a Yahoo! Maps AJAX Api key. (you’ll need a Yahoo! account first)

OK. Now, don’t be afraid at this AJAX API stuff, it is just html combined with some kind of smart Javascript. But you won’t have to mingle with the code. Check out their example of Yahoo!Maps API with geoRSS . All you need to do is save the html code of that page on your server and replace the occurences of “YahooDemo” dummy API key with your own API key. Now you can display it on your website.

If that’s working , you are almost done.

Remove the "var cPT = new YGeoPoint(41.85,-87.65); // chicago" line and replace it by "map.setMapType(YAHOO_MAP_SAT) ;"

The map should now use the much more nicer satellite view. You just made your first steps using the Yahoo! Maps AJAX Api by the way!

Now, the last step is to replace the feed in the map.addOverlay call :
map.addOverlay(new YGeoRSS('http://ws.geonames.org/rssToGeoRSS?
feedUrl=http://today.reuters.com/rss/worldNews'));

www.geonames.com provides a webservice capable of adding latitude and longitude geo information to any RSS feed based on its contents. You can replace the feedURL argument by any RSS feed of your choice. Of course it is more reliable with news feeds since they often contain some place name in their title.

But give it a try and leave your cool geoRSS displays links in the comments !

This entry was posted on Friday, February 16th, 2007 at 12:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.