How to add a GeoURL for Japanese websites

By Oli
At 12:29 PM · Wednesday, 29 October · 2003
To Japan · Weblogging

I’m finally using a GeoURL. Unfortunately living in Japan makes things more interesting that they would be otherwise. For starters I needed to find my location’s latitude and longitude. My town’s Yakuba（役場） had no idea, which I found rather unbelievable. I also searched on Yahoo.jp’s map service, but for some strange reason selecting my location at one zoom level then zooming in or out changes the location considerably. For example, if you select the greatest detail from the previous URL, I end up in the sea :-) I suspect that the level of detail isn’t there, because at the maximum zoom level URL hacking gives the same place with either zoom level’s latitude/longitude values (if that makes sense). I also checked with MapFan and Mapion, who all gave slightly different results for the same place on the map. I’ve decided to use the most detailed Yahoo map results.

Next I converted my latitude & longitude values from the degrees/minutes/seconds(/somethings?) into the decimal format GeoURL needs. Finally I added the required tags to my MT template according to GeoURL’s instructions. This includes a Dublin Core tag, which you can find out more about in the DC Usage Guide.

For those wanting to just copy and paste, here’s what you need to put between your <head> tags (replace the “LAT”, “LOG”, and “DESCRIPTION” values with your latitude, longitude and website description)

For XHTLML

<meta name="ICBM" content="LAT, LOG" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="DESCRIPTION" />

For HTLML

<meta name="ICBM" content="LAT, LOG">
<meta name="DC.title" content="DESCRIPTION">

For example, mine is

<meta name="ICBM" content="34.34251, 136.89557" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="Boblet; Learned things and Japan diary, by Oli Studholme" />

I’d highly recommend playing with the high resolution maps at GeoURL — I was amazed how many islands there are in the middle of nowhere. Very fun! The only bad things are the map distortion and the DevianTART spam.

Discussion...

Comments (2) · TrackBacks (0)  to  http://www.boblet.net/cgi-bin/mttb-external.cgi/30
1. Comment by Daphne  · 4 Nov, 2003 · 8:39 PM

I’m near some sort of tsunami warning station (I couldn’t target the arrow on the exact location on their map). So I’ve located myself in some prefecture I have never heard of in my life. I tried to change it but it was getting worse and worse.

I took the geourl off… because it wasn’t valid xhtml !

computer klutz Daphne

2. Comment by oli  · 9 Nov, 2003 · 10:53 AM

I’ve put code snippets in for HTML and XHTML. You probably forgot the final ” />”. It validates fine here ;-)