Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Back in 2012, I was planning to build a location-aware app that would tell me about interesting sights & news-worthy facts about places that fall in the way of a train journey. I discovered that Web Dev guru Chris Heilmann ( @codepo8 ) had built a nifty app on a similar theme and shared the JavaScript code under the BSD license.  Things Around You used the browser's geolocation feature to find Wikipedia articles on nearby landmarks via the GeoNames API & list them with a brief description. For a Windows 8 app hackathon, I utilized the Geolocation detection idea to build a little app that I called GeoBuzz & posted it on the Windows 8 App Store. It's been on the back of my mind to extend it with more features. Now that GitHub Copilot is here, there was no need to procrastinate. I had a friendly chat with GitHub Copilot ( Gemini Flash model ). In under an hour, I customized @codepo8's original sample to include a map directly on the web page instead of linking t...

Yahoo! has devised a unique identifier called the Where on Earth ID, or WOEID - for almost any named place on the Earth. This is used by APIs like Twitter Trends , flickr etc. However, a majority of geo-location related APIs require latitude, longitude of a place to provide their services. So if you're building a mash-up that has to deal with latitude, longitude and WOEID, you can resolve a WOEID to a place with this call: http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/2507854?appid=[YourYahooAppidHere] Replace, 2507854 in the above example with the WOEID of the location whose co-ordinates you want to find. The results can be requested in XML or JSON format.