Another pie-in-the-sky extension idea - Member Mapping

3stripe

I'm intrigued as to where everyone is from (I'm usually on here when you guys are all asleep, I know that much) So, this would be a simple world map, with a dot for each user. You would add a tag to your custom information with your position on it, in geodata format (geo:lat=26.58 geo:long=-97.83 or whatever), and then link this up to something like http://www.brainoff.com/worldkit/ - which interestingly can work from an RSS feed... Once again, I can't program (although I can modify existing code with some degree of success usually) so how hard would this be... you would just need to code something that spat out all members' geodata into an rss feed? And maybe have an easy way to find the geodata for where you live? The RSS needs to go something like: <?xml version="1.0"?> <rss version="2.0" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"> <channel> ... <item> <title>An example annotation</title> <link>http://example.com/geo</link> <description>Just an example</description> <geo:lat>26.58</geo:lat> <geo:long>-97.83</geo:long> </item> ... </channel> </rss>

3stripe

Or you could hook up to the Google Maps API?

stuart

There was a guy on a messageboard I used who did just that. Users were asked to go to a google map page, click on the page where they were from, and the enter thier username. A private message was then sent to that user with a verification link. All very cool.

Minisweeper

i seem to remember somethibg like this from o8 days. Certainly very cool!

jarred

dont bash me for using the "f" word, but you could do this really nicely in flash. have a world map then load an xml doc with user's co-ordinates and put little glowing circles on their positions that link through to their profile.. you could even have different colors for most recently active and/or member levels....

3stripe

flash, yeah, now there is the one and only language i can program, on a good day :-) i want this for my board now... must... have... any nice programmers wanna colloborate with me on this? reckon you could also do a geographical tagcloud by combining this with a tag mapper as well - could be interesting.

zeman

I'd be interested in helping out on the mapping. I designed a flash photoblog world map that could easily integrate with vanilla. It takes a simple xml feed and displays photos on a flash map. We could either turn the photos off or have an extra field in the members information. Could also combine with the avatar extension. http://www.allthegoodness.com/projects/map/ If someone can point me in the right direction for creating an extension that adds to the members profile we can get something working quickly. All we need to add is a latitude and longitude and a url to a photo to show on the map. For adding lots of points my flash map runs much better than google maps. Note: I ask for donations of at least $1 to download the map but it is open source.

ADM

"There was a guy on a messageboard I used who did just that. Users were asked to go to a google map page, click on the page where they were from, and the enter thier username. A private message was then sent to that user with a verification link. All very cool." Yeah a guy on shacknews.com did something similar, unless that's the one you're talking about ;)

shad0w913

A google maps thingy would be cooler, IMO, and probably easier.

3stripe

Jeez I had totally forgotten boot this idea, it would still be nice, and Google maps might have even more potential for other stuff as well I guess

3stripe

Looks like http://www.frappr.com/ does the job, bit messy though... can it be modded?

hellfish

If I understood the custom information fields that are inserted on the database and how they work I could make a simple map using Google Maps that would list every one that entered they latitude and longitute in those fields for example.

3stripe

Hehe cool, that's what I thought, but I'm too lazy to do anything about it. Maybe email Mark and ask him? Who knows maybe he's read this thread?

hellfish

I'll have to read the documentation first, I don't want to bother him just because I'm lazy :p

3stripe

ha! i had a look and didn't find anything in my search, so posted the question to http://lussumo.com/docs/doku.php?id=vanilla:faqs in case anyone ever reads it... would like to see this extension just to find out where everyone on here is from! failing that i would crack open some of the vanilla files and see what the code is doing if I could be arsed, or have a poke around the database (don't have an install of my own anymore though)

lech

Jstripe, another idea could be automatic member mapping via Geo IP. This is given that the user is not behind a proxy of any type in a totally different country around the world. Although it could be done if you enable IP's and translate those IP's via Geo IP on the fly while still masking them. Just have it done on a weekly/monthly basis if your board has really heavy traffic or when the user signs up. My 2 bits.

3stripe

I was thinking about that earlier today actually. MIght not be as accurate like you say but less work to set up...

nick1presta

I kinda created a mapping thing. It just traces your IP address to what country you're from via PHP and MySQL Database.

c-unit

I wouldn't have it be based off IPs, I'd just have people enter a zip code when they registered.

Minisweeper

thats assuming everyone had a zipcode... you could work on longs/lats and fall back to ip's for users who hadnt provided the info. The frappr engine is rather nice though.

3stripe

zipcodes only work for THAT country.