Just a quick reminder that there are still lots of spaces left for the Open Hack Day in New York city on the 9th and 10th of October. Much like Yahoo’s other open hack days you’ll get 24 hours time to play with any API and built something amazing with people you always wanted to work or got to know there.

If your company doesn’t allow you to play much, this is your chance. The event is free, and you’ll get to play not only with the things you already see here or on developer.yahoo.com but also with the new Yahoo Application Platform for apps running on the homepage and the new TV widgets.

• Sign up for NYC Open Hack here

Over the course of the weekend I finished polishing GeoMaker and uploaded the source to GitHub. So now you can use GeoMaker or its API and also host them on your own server.

The new features include:

• Embedding of Geo microformats into a text when originally you wanted to analyse a text and intermediate text display.
• Turning RSS feeds into maps (much like RSS2Map) with an intermediate filtering step
• Total re-code (includes instead of one massive chunk, configuration and labels file)
• Help and About and Developer docs

See the changes in action in the following screencast (the design of the RSS preview has changed since – more obvious now):

The next steps will be to allow for multiple map providers. Got any other ideas?

• Download GeoMaker on GitHub
• Visit GeoMaker

This morning I went to the Telegraph Media Group to talk about GeoMaker and Placemaker. The main thing they wanted to know was how to place an RSS feed that does not have any Geo data on a map and how to style it.

To make this easier I created rss2map, a demo PHP script with all the CSS and JavaScript needed to show a feed on a map:

• Get the code from GitHub RSS2map on GitHub
• Read the documentation on GitHub RSS2map docs
• Check out the rss2map demo page

• A great flickr collection of Lego Minifig re-enactments of classic photos
• The w3c showing some very dry twitter humour
• How to fake time travel using twitter
• Gez Lemon shows how to create accessible drag and drop using ARIA.
• YQL is now not only read but also insert,update and delete.
• A great but also very graphic video and campaign about Motor Neurone Disease – MND
• The BBC finally released their JavaScript library Glow as open source.
• Slickmap is a CSS to show sitemaps in a very nice fashion.
• A proposal for Anti paparazzi clothes and accessories
• A Nice tongue-in-cheek minimal CSS framework
• A proposal by Yahoo to open source one of our Apache mods – geared for high traffic sites
• SoundAmp – an application for the iPhone turns the device into something of a hearing -aid. Whilst this does not really help the hard of hearing I love that somebody thought about using the microphone of the iPhone as an input and thought about accessibility.
• A set of Lovely social media icons by Paul Robert Lloyd

Geolocating content on the web is a great idea. By embedding latitude and longitude and real place names in your document you allow data mining for location or easy display on a map.

The problem up to now was that it is quite a job to find out the correct geo information from a text or a document and it is quite a pain to enter the information by hand.

Yahoo Placemaker is a web service that helps you with that – you give it some text or a document URL and it returns you all the things it found in there that resemble a geographical location back. The issue with doing that on a live site is that you slow down your site immensely as you need to look up every time.

The more logical place to do the lookup with Placemaker is when you edit your document. I thought this would be cool to have for this WordPress install here and wrote a small GreaseMonkey script that injects a new “Geo this!” button in the main WP form:

When I hit the button the script does an Ajax request using the Placemaker open YQL table to get the information for the currently edited text.

Once it found the information it adds it at the end of the document as a GEO microformat. Each found entry starts with a comment that tells you what Placemaker matched and considered a geographical location. As it is not infallible this makes it easy for you to delete wrong entries.

Try it out yourself:

• Install Geo this!
• Check out the source on github

This is pretty much rough and ready and I’d be happy for feedback how to improve it.