anilmakhijani.com

Geo Blogroll

What does this plugin do?

This plugin allows you to geotag any of your links and then provides the ability to add a map of your geotagged links to your theme.

How do I install and configure the plugin?

  1. Download the plugin from wordpress.org.
  2. Unzip the plugin into the /wp-content/plugins directory on your webserver.
  3. Activate the plugin.
  4. Navigate to the settings page for the Geo Blogroll plugin. As of WordPress 2.7 this page should be located at http://yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=geo-blogroll/geo_blogroll.php)
  5. Add your Google API key. (You can get one here.)
  6. Add a width for your map. This can be in pixels or a percentage.
  7. Add a height to your map. This can be in pixels or a percentage.
  8. Add a center point to the map. This can be any address that Google geocoder can decode.
  9. Add a map zoom level. This can be a number from 1 to 10.
  10. Add a level of noise that you want to add to each of the mapped points. (You should almost always leave this at 0.) The reason this option is here is because when you have a number of blogs that geocode to the same location, the markers that represent these blogs lay directly on top of each other on the map, rendering some of the markers unclickable. Adding some random noise to the location of the markers fixes this overlap problem. This is the least elegant of all solutions but was the quickest to implement. In the future I hope to implement something a bit better than this.

How do I geotag the blogs from my blog roll?

You should see a “Link Geography” section that looks like this whenever you try and edit a link:

Any link that has a city, state, and country defined will show up on your map.

How do I create a google map of the geotagged blogs?

To show the map within your theme simply add this code to your theme:

<?php if (function_exists(geo_blogroll_show_map)) {geo_blogroll_show_map(); }; ?>

Comments

8 responses to “Geo Blogroll”

  1. anilmakhijani.com » Geo Blogroll Plugin Released

    […] I had promised to clean up and release some of the plugins that went into creating Streetsblog.net. Here is the first one: Geo Blogroll. […]

  2. Bloggeotagging: be spatially enabled blogger | sharkofagus

    […] dan menampilkannya dalam peta: GeoPress, Geo Mashup; menampilkan lokasi Blogroll ke dalam peta: Geo Blogroll, WP Geo; dan […]

  3. agus Avatar
    agus

    Hi, when I saved my setting page, an error message came out: Cannot load geo_blogroll/geo_blogroll.php.

    I think I already did all your configuration steps. Please help. I do like the idea of this plugin. Thank ou

  4. Anil Avatar
    Anil

    @agus: I am glad that you like the plugin. I think the problem is that my name of the folder and the file are different, which is causing you issues. If you rename the plugin folder from geo-blogroll to geo_blogroll, it should work. Let me know if this works and if you have any other issues.

  5. agus Avatar
    agus

    Thank you for your quick response.

    Having renamed the folder, although it did come an error message, the plugin works (the error is “Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in …./geo_blogroll/geo_blogroll.php on line 214”).

    Yes, it works but not perfectly. It shows the map but I cannot see any placemark icon on it. When I checked my links, all information I saved (city, state, country) are gone. Is it related to the error I mentioned above?

    Secondly, when I put the map on my sidebar (about 200px width), the copyright related thing is very annoying. It breaks the ‘box’ as the copyright sentence length is wider than my sidebar width.

    Little suggestions for future dev’t:
    1. I use for preventing my blog crash when I deactivated the plugin;
    2. A shortcode for displaying map on page or post would be great;

    Thank you

  6. Anil Avatar
    Anil

    @agus: I’ll try to answer all of your questions here:

    1. Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION:

    I commented the CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION line out of my code and it seemingly has no effect on functionality. Hopefully this fixes your warning.

    2. Your link’s geographical information not showing up:

    I accidentally hard coded the WordPress links table to be wp_links rather than using $wpdb->links. The 0.13 release of this plugin should fix this.

    3. The Google copyright is annoying:

    You can add the following CSS to your code to hide the copyright:

    .gmnoprint {
    display: none;
    }

    4. Prevent the blog from crashing when you deactivate the plugin:

    Rather than just adding geo_blogroll_show_map(); to your template, add this:

    I updated the documentation to reflect this.

    5. Add a shortcode.

    I should do this. I’ll add this to my to-do list.

  7. Ari Avatar
    Ari

    I cannot see the Link section. Where is it supposed to be?
    How do I edit the link? I am afraid obvious question to some are a challenge to others..!
    Thank you

  8. Anil Avatar
    Anil

    @Ari: it depends on what version of WordPress you have. A tutorial on how to use the links manager is here: Links Manager

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