Since I took over the Grand Rapids WiFi site I’ve been wanting to let users search by location, finding all their nearest spots. What I lacked was any simple way of converting addresses into longitude/latitude so that I could then do the calculations required.
While exploring the Wireless London project recently I followed a few links and discovered geocoder.us, a site that provides just that data. So a quick interface to their web services offering, a little application of pythagoras’ theorem, and it’s all in place on the search page.
Inspired by the Wireless London project, I also added RDF/XML versions of all the location data on the site. For any techies so inclined, you can get to that through link tags in each location page’s html header.