On Nov 13, 2005, at 11:07 PM, Roy Schestowitz wrote:
http://www.mapservices.org/myguestmap/
I assume you are familiar with MyGuestmap already, but I should
probably
not assume anything. The service plots readership, not comments,
but these
are technically similar.
I was not. It looks similar to Frappr.com. It's not doing it for
me. :-)
This makes you plug-in a very desirable one in comparison and I
think it will attract enormous interest among WordPress users,
particular-
ly if it is made trivial to install.
It's nice to have an idea that others appreciate. :-) I don't think
it's going to be simply a drop-in thing, however. There's only one
extension point for the comments form, and that puts additional
fields *after* the submit button (and not very neatly, at that).
This will probably mean that the user will have to modify or create a
Page template (if they choose to limit this functionality to just
Pages) to make the comments form look prettier.
I will also need to figure out how to display the map on the Page;
perhaps I can do that via a filter...
of "Reader Locations", and collect on that page, via comments,
the location of the
Will it perhaps be worth anonymising? People might not want to be
publicly
bound to an IP address or, even worse, their postcode and location.
I sup-
pose you speak of a temporary (intermediate) solution here.
I'm doing this in the vein of Frappr, which allows you to specify a
post code, and it's done in such a way that the user is expected to
*not* be anonymized. Again, this will be the user voluntarily
contributing their location, so it'll be up to them to give up their
location. I don't feel there's a need right now to hide their identity.
It looks like, in order to store the additional geographical
information about the comment, I will have to create my own table
in the DB. Is this correct? Is there any existing mechanism
for storing arbitrary data about a comment?
How about a schema for 'user'? If commenters return time after
time, there
might be plenty of duplication. If you change the database,
however, this
would make the plug-in difficult to install and retract.
Oh, can arbitrary user data be stored? I didn't realize that.
Continuing along with comments on a blog, perhaps I've lived a
sheltered life, but I've yet to see a single WP blog that uses an
account (or even provides a "register" link) for people posting
comments. That might make sense in a more closed-door community, but
not for what I've got in mind. For example, two different sites in
the last week (whiteroofradio.com and motoringfile.com) have created
Frappr maps for people to add their location if they read the site.
That's what I'm trying to emulate. I think there's value in being
able to display the map and collect the data within the confines of
WP and without sending the user to another site.
I'm unfortunately aware of the limitation of creating a new table,
but provided I don't modify the schema of any existing tables (which
did briefly flit across my mind), it won't really be impacting
anything...
How about changing wp-post-comment.php (not sure about the
filename) to
include a call to a completely separate and new function which
does noth-
ing but accumulate IP addresses or locational information? This
will leave
everything else unchanged. This isolation would be a healthy one
for rea-
sons I described in the previous paragraph.
Ah, without the user's explicit interaction? Not a bad idea, except
that the ip->geo data isn't good enough. My IP (sometimes!) shows me
being in Chicago. I live in Indianapolis.
--
Brian Lalor / blalor@xxxxxxxxxx
Stewardess: We know you have your choice of bankrupt carriers
and we
appreciate you choosing us.
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