Many amongst us bloggers know the the service www.geourl.org. It offered a way to register your blog in a directory for certain geographical coordinates. Furthermore, there was a way to get a list of other blogs which are near to your blog.

However, for what reason ever, since May/June this year, the service is down for renovations and has not relaunched yet so far. Since I liked the idea of this services and I realized that others do as well, I was setting up a re-making of it, which I have launched at the URL http://www.geourl.info now.

Please feel free and register your blog and tell your blog buddies to register their site, too.

For all MovableType bloggers using the MTLocation plugin : To adjust the URL from ‘.com’ or ‘.org’ to ‘.info’, you have to edit the the ‘mt_location.pl’ file (you find it in your plugins directory of your MovableType installtion) and change the URL-ending in function location so that it looks like this:

sub location {
  my $ctx = shift;
  my $args = shift;
  return "" unless $ctx->stash('entry')->keywords;
  my @keywords = split (/ /, $ctx->stash('entry')->keywords); 
  foreach (@keywords) {
      if (/^loc/) {
      my ($name, $latitude, $longitude) = @{$loc_hash{$_}};
      if ($args->{geourl} && $latitude && $longitude) { 
          return 
          "<a href="'http://www.geourl.info/near/?">$name</a>";
      }
      else {
          return $name;
      }
      }
  }
  return "Somewhere, SW";
}

For being compatible with the old URLs like

http://www.geourl.info/near/?lat=51.5567&lon=-0.0505&dist=50′

GeoURL.info offers the same query syntax as the former GeoURL site did. That means, you really have to change the URL-ending only. If you have any comments or wishes, don’t hesitate to write a comment or send me a mail.

Have fun with the new GeoURL service!