Using worldKit with WordPress

  • Mikel Maron’s worldKit is a free and fully customizable Flash application that maps out your post locations by extracting your geourl data (assuming you’ve been entering them into your posts) and plots them on a super dope looking map (which you can also customize) with hover over text boxes which contain excerpts from your rss feed and link to your archived entry. You can see an example here. Make sure to click on the links to the right to see how the same rss feed can be plotted on several different maps.
    Here’s how to do it:

    1. Download worldKit
    2. Unzip the folder where you want the map to reside. I chose “wp-root-directory/wp-worldkit.”
    3. Open the file “config.xml” and change the <dataurl> from “rss.xml” to “https://wp-root-directory/feed/rss2/&#8221; (NOTE: do not include quotation marks)
    4. Save “config.xml” and upload the entire worldkit directory to your server
    5. Open “wp-rss2.php” in your WordPress root directory
    6. On line 30, in the rss declaration, add xmlns:icbm="https://postneo.com/icbm/" after xmlns:content="https://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
    7. Lines 30 – 32 should therefore look like:

      <rss version="2.0"
      xmlns:content="https://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
      xmlns:icbm="https://postneo.com/icbm/">

    8. Then, below, in the <item> section, underneath , put the following two lines of code:

      <icbm:latitude><?php echo get_Lat(); ?></icbm:latitude>
      <icbm:longitude><?php echo get_Lon(); ?></icbm:longitude>

    9. Save “wp-rss2.php” and upload it to your server. That’s it.

      10. Check out the worldKit website for more information about how to configure your map and the “index.html” file which displays the map. And please consider dropping Mikel some paypal change for making such a great application free. Also, looks like some phat upgrades are in store.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • I played with this yesterday, and people I link to are now on a world map.
    The results are here: https://www.tamba2.org.uk/linkmap/
    It’s really really easy to do.
    1. Download Worldkit.
    2. Open ‘rss.xml’
    3. These are what you edit:
    <item>
    <title>Welcome to WorldKit</title>
    <link>https://brainoff.com/worldkit</link>
    <description>If you see this, you have successfully installed worldKit on your webserver!
    </description>
    <icbm:latitude>0</icbm:latitude>
    <icbm:longitude>0</icbm:longitude>
    </item>
    4. Make one of those for each of the people you want to link to. For instance, here’s Carthik’s entry on my list:
    <item>
    <title>Blog.Carthik</title>
    <link>https://blog.carthik.net</link>
    <description>C A R T H I K . N E T</description>
    <icbm:latitude>28.596115</icbm:latitude>
    <icbm:longitude>-81.210102</icbm:longitude>
    </item>
    5. You get their latitude / longitude by going to their site and ‘View Source’. If they have entered data, you’ll see something other than ‘0,0’.
    6. Upload the lot.
    7. Run it in the browser.
    Easy ??
    My files, if you want to see them, are at:
    https://www.tamba2.org.uk/linkmap/config.xml
    https://www.tamba2.org.uk/linkmap/rss.xml

    Doesn’t the worldkit script extract the lat/long from each post?

    Not as it stands, no.
    Worldkit simply runs through a file – which you have to supply – and displays the dots/locations.
    One way to supply it is through a manually created feed (xml file). This is the method I used above and at https://www.mfr.f2s.com/worldpress/
    The other way – which is demonstrated at World Geoblog ( https://brainoff.com/geoblog/ ) is by dynamically creating such a feed.This is done by writing the script to query somewhere like weblogs.com for each time a blog updates, then query the blog for it’s geodata, and if it has it and the geodata is in the correct format, add that data to the feed.
    It was the “writing the script” bit that threw me ??

    You could also edit the wp-locations.php file. This is already in the required format, but needs the xml tag names changed.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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