Entries tagged “google”

Email, in a lot of ways, is one of the most critical applications for me.

[rbu]: http://reviewsby.us/ [ymap]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/index.html [gmap]: http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ [ygeo]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html [GeoRSS]: http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/georss/index.html [symfony]: http://www.symfony-project.com/ [GeoRSS][GeoRSS] is an extension of RSS that incorporates geographic data (i.e. latitude/longitude coordinates). This is useful for plotting any data that might need to be placed on a map. While building out the [reviewsby.us][rbu] map, I decided to use the [Yahoo! Maps API][ymap] versus the [Google Maps API][gmap] because I wanted to gain some familiarity with another API. It was worth trying [Yahoo!'s API][ymap]. First of all, [reviewsby.us][rbu] has addresses for restaurants and Yahoo! provides a simple [Geocoding REST][ygeo] service. This made it easy for me to convert street addresses to latitude and longitude pairs (even though this wasn't required as we'll soon see).^[1] The real selling point of [Yahoo!][ymap] was the [GeoRSS] functionality. I can extend an RSS feed (which [symfony] generates quite easily) to add latitude or longitude points (or even the street address), direct my [Yahoo! map][ymap] to the feed and voila, all the locations in that feed are now on the map, and when I click on them, the RSS item is displayed. That cut down on a lot of development time.