The Vancouver Scrum

On the move!

Agh! You’re still here? My new site and weblog, ianking.ca is now up and running; new posts are building up over there, never to be mirrored here. Go! What are you waiting for? All the stuff worth keeping has been migrated over to the new server, and I don’t anticipate making any more posts here.

Bloggers and webmasters: Update your links! Simply replace vancouverscrum.blogspot.com with www.ianking.ca in your blogrolls or bookmarks to point to the new site. Old posts will remain on this server for as long as the people at Blogger/Google allow them to remain; unfortunately, I’m not going to bother to come up with any way of converting permalinks on this blog to their corresponding posts on the new site. Yes, I plead laziness. I also realize the irony of switching away from Blogger just it starts to add features that the demanding blog nerds insist upon.

Thanks for reading and linking, and see you over at ianking.ca!

—Ian King, December 13, 2004

Monday, March 17, 2003

 
GeoURL is a novel idea: an index of web sites by geographical location instead of the usual criteria. The idea is that surfers will be able to enter a set of coordinates, or a city, and see what web sites are produced, or whose subject is, within a given distance of that location -- as opposed to where their servers are located, which is how the 'net is usually 'mapped.'

Getting your site indexed at GeoURL takes a few unusual steps. You have to look up the geographic coordinates of your location, and then enter a couple of meta tags with your site's location so that GeoURL can index the site. This isn't all that difficult, and within a few minutes, your web creation is in the database and you can then see what sites on GeoURL are near you. So far, there aren't many sites listed but, with any luck and a little promotion, this will catch on. Here's their list of sites near Vancouver. For some reason, the GeoURL people have decided that their point of reference for Vancouver will be a spot somewhere around East 55th and Sophia, an unremarkable residential neighbourhood in South Vancouver. Why they chose that spot rather than City Hall, or a point in the central business district, or maybe the city's geographical centre is beyond me.

Another nitpick: the directory's accuracy is dependent on websites accurately submitting their geographical coordinates -- something that I got wrong on the first try (typo -- made a difference of about 3 miles). I've since fixed it, and now the list of sites nearest mine seems about right.


(via Derek K. Miller at penmachine.com)
posted at 11:22 — new improved comments — 0 so far
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