Planning to blog your vacation? Why not geocode your blog posts, so that you can let visitors know where you are? That’s the idea behind a new tool for WordPress that uses Placemaker (our Placemaker API profile) to find a location from a body of text. When we covered Placemaker’s launch we mentioned its usefulness for geocoding others’ blog posts, as well as newspaper articles. With the WordPress plugin, you can do the work ahead of time, but without trying to determine your exact coordinates.
The tool, announced on the Yahoo Developer blog uses a Firefox Greasemonkey script to embed a “geo this” button within the WordPress admin screen. Click the button and it makes a YQL call to Placemaker, sending along the contents of your post. Upon returning, it embeds the results in the Geo microformat, so the location can be recognized.
If you’re looking for something a little more hands on, be sure to check out GeoPress, a plugin for WordPress that uses Skyhook’s WiFi data to attempt to determine your current location.
This blogging tool along with the GeoMaker app we highlighted last week show the increasingly diverse ways that geo APIs like Placemaker can be put to use.
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