[toytaco99]

Originally Posted by JohnGBSA

Brilliant site!

Lets nag them for their code!

Here's his (the site owner) response when asked about sharing their info:

Obviously, we're using Google maps API for the map display. The trickest part of that is that Google doesn't provide a geocoder to convert addresses to latitude/longitude, so we had to build our own. We were able to find data for this from the census bureau. We found two very text large files -- one for the US and one for everywhere else. The US one has zip codes and lat/long and the international one just have names of cities and lat/long. So, we imported those into MySQL and turned them into databases. Then, we wrote a script to compare the user address info aganist the geocoding databases and write the results to an XML file. we run that on a cron job every 30 minutes so that the XML file is updated with new users and address changes.

From there, it's pretty simple. Google maps API is prepared to take in an XML file, so it's pretty much straight from their example javascript on their site.

And that's about it.

He says the geocode databases are somewhere around 400MB. Woweee!

(I don't want to hi-jack this plug-in's thread, so should we start a new thread on this?)