Well, when you are in the mood for coding…some weeks ago I had the idea of developing a WordPress plugin that enables the author to easily visualize a location mentioned in a post or on a page. What I came up in the end is GeoLinkr (yeah, I know, greetings from Flickr, I had to follow the trend). To let you know how it works, I created a screenshot-collage. Feel free to check it out.
Let me explain what the plugin does and how to use it. Say, you have away at the weekend and visited somebody in another town or city. Like me, I have been to Linz in Upper Austria one week ago. Say you want to mention this in your blog and now some of your (international) readers might ask: “Where the heck is Linz?”. To avoid discussions and disputes, you could simply show them on a map. And when it comes to maps these days, one of the first things that come to my mind is Google Maps. A very sweet piece of software.
If you have GeoLinkr installed, helping your visitors to fill that knowledge gap in their brains is…actually a no-brainer. All you need to do is wrap the name of the city/town in anchor-tags and set the rel-attribute to “geolinkr”. And that’s it. Want a demo? Here it is:
I have been to Linz, Austria last week.
By marking up the link with rel=”geolinkr”, some JavaScript works in the background that takes the name of the city and passes it to the Google Maps API to generate a map, displaying the city. The map gets displayed in an overlay box with a dimmed background. In the WordPress Admin panel, you are able to set the width and the height of both the box and the map, among other things.
Another nice thing is that it degrades gracefully. Meaning that if JavaScript is enabled, it works as described above. Without JavaScript, the visitor gets redirected to the page that was specified in the href-attribute of the link. In this case, no map gets displayed, but still the visitor is able to get some info regarding this location (e.g. from Wikipedia).
The GeoLinkr detail page offers an in-depth description of the plugin. I’d like to encourage you to check it out and provide me with feedback.
Hey Klaus,
Just wondering if you’ve got any screenshots of your new plugin in action? I’m not a WordPress user, but I’m still interested in what you’re doing and a screenshot might help encourage more people to grab your plugin(s).
This is great Klaus. Nice work on this.
Jonathan:
You are right, it might add a little more understanding on how they work. I originally thought that showing examples might be sufficient.
I just created some screenshots and placed links to them in the posts and the plugin detail pages.
Chad:
Thanks very much!
Great, now I can see what your plugins do. They look really good!