Some improvements to geohash.org were made. Some of them were
motivated by a conversation with Rodrigo Stulzer.
- Support for geocoding addresses (city names, whatever). E.g. http://geohash.org/?q=21 Millbank, London
- Support for moving the Geohash marker in the embedded map, so that modifying the position visually is easier.
- Support for providing a “name” to Geohashes, by appending a colon and the name, in a nice format. E.g. http://geohash.org/c216ne:Mt_Hood
- Provided a bookmark to get a Geohash while in Google Maps.
- Provided a Google Maps Mapplet. When enabled, it adds a Geohash marker identifying the Geohash position in Google Maps, and it may be moved around. Here is a screenshot:
Check out the Tips & Tricks page for details on these features.
After about one year writing this service in my spare time, it’s finally out.
geohash.org offers short URLs which encode a latitude/longitude pair, so that referencing them in emails, forums, and websites is more convenient.
Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision, similar prefixes for nearby positions, and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). I’ve put the algorithm created in the public domain. Some details may be seen in the Wikipedia article about it (hopefully that’ll help establishing prior art, and prevent Microsoft from patenting it).
To obtain the Geohash, the user provides latitude and longitude coordinates in a single input box (most commonly used formats for latitude and longitude pairs are accepted), and performs the request.
Besides showing the latitude and longitude corresponding to the given Geohash, users who navigate to a Geohash at geohash.org are also presented with an embedded map, and may download a GPX file, or transfer the waypoint directly to certain GPS receivers. Links are also provided to external sites that may provide further details around the specified location.
brother…
My brother Diogo is in town! Good to see him after so much time.
pycon…
PyCon 2007 was fantastic. It was great to meet everyone there, and we had two awesome sprinting weeks around it.
confluence…
I’ve recently visited a confluence with a good friend of mine. Kayaks, paddling, walking, driving, swimming, aslphalt, sand, water, grass.. it was awesome.
svn2bzr…
It looks like Bazaar tags are now really coming, so I’m doing some work on svn2bzr again. Hopefully this time I’ll really migrate some projects over.
editmoin…
Version 1.9 of editmoin was released.
smart…
Some work in Smart is coming in the upcoming weeks.
projects…
Hopefully I’ll be able to speak more openly about (some of the) interesting things I’ve been working on in the near future.
Continuing my put-those-bits-out-of-your-hard-drive campaign, I’ve released a patched version of GPSBabel with support for input and output of waypoints, tracks and routes in the binary file format of GPS TrackMaker.
The patch was written six months ago (sorry 
). I just had to port it over to a recent version of GPSBabel.
The original reason for the patch is that there is quite a good amount of information under that format for Brazil, and GPSBabel is able to deliver information directly to some brands of GPS devices. Hopefully this will get applied upstream soon.
