The Best City in the World
Posted by Jon Lee in Web Development, tags: geolocation, web development
Jason Spence wrote an interesting article about Geographic Content and why it isn’t good to write for a specific local audience. I would disagree. In this post, I am going to write about a very specific location: a city – but not just any city, the best city in the world. And I think you might agree with me!
This weekend, I went to visit some old friends in this wonderful city. The city itself was beautiful, the people were extraordinarily nice and the food was great! What city am I talking about? Find out after the jump!
The best city in the world is of course Washington DC! Are you surprised I picked Washington as the best city in the world? Don’t be, its not a coincidence
What I did was a little trick called geolocation. Basically, the server takes your IP address and compares it with a database in order to determine what city your IP address belongs to. The accuracy is not perfect though, due to various factors. If you live in a small town, chances are you will be grouped with the closest major city. Or if you are using a proxy server, the location of the proxy server will be used. Or… the database could just be plain wrong.This method also runs into several complications. For one, wp-cache would not work correctly since it needs to generate new data for every visitor, which is why the city is not mentioned until the single post page, which I have put into the exclusion list in wp-cache settings. Also, there may not always be a matching city found, in which case a default city can be displayed (in this case, I set the default to Toronto).
Advantages include the ability to personalize content for your audience. This post may not be the best example but it gives you a general idea of what you can do. Also, you could use this method to automatically determine the weather without having a user select a city. There is also the added benefit of being able to track your visitors to see where they are from (a lot of software do this already).
I’m sure you can come up with many other creative uses for this! I will write a how-to shortly 
P.S. I actually do agree with Jason in that content specifically targeted to a small local group would not be popular with most of your readers!
Popularity: 2% [?]
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