Really cool Google Map idea that'll never work :(
Posted: Sun Aug 17, 2008 8:28 am
Ok, so I decide to have a little "Joe time" this weekend. I've been working much to hard lately and needed the personal distraction. Digging deep into my creative processes, I decided to try and tackle something really cool if it worked.
Several people have commented on how my Recent Orders Map (http://www.solunar.com/ordersmap.aspx) is really slick and they'd like to know if I could sell it as a user control for their site. So I sat down today (actually about 6:00am) and gave it a shot just for entertainment purposes.
The trick to any map like Google is that you have to feed it locations for each marker to represent. These can be in the form of Latitude/Longitude pairs or actual names like "Rushville, Indiana" or "Tower, MN 55790". While Lat/Long are the easiest and fastest, you don't have that information in an AC7 storefront.
Enter...Geocoding. This is a method in which literal names of a location are translated into their respective latitude/longitude coordinates. It's been around for a while but there's still a quite a bit of misconception about it. Geocoding takes a name and returns a lat/long. REVERSE (sometimes called Inverse) Geocoding takes a lat/long and returns the nearest literal name.
I have a unique situation in that my most specialized product is actually sold by latitude and longitude. This makes it a perfect candidate for a mapping system like Google Maps. That's how I'm able to show the Recent Orders Map - every marker represents a Solunar Fishing Times/Hunting Times order. What it doesn't show is all my regular product orders.
Geocoding using the .Net module I have for the Google Map on my site is incredibly simple. Unfortunately it's never going to work. Google imposes a per-IP daily limit on the number of GeoCoding requests. Since my site is going to get hit thousands of times, just having the last 25 orders geocoded is going to burn that limit up pretty quickly. Once the limit is hit, Google throws a 403 Forbidden error and the page crashes
Test Page (might not work): http://www.Solunar.com/test-GoogleMap.aspx
So, it was a great idea but it's not going to be possible. You could buy Googles Premier Map API service but that's going to add a monthly fee. You could buy a separate zip-code database, but again a monthly fee (and downloads) to keep it current will be required.
I considered Geocoding each order when it is initially saved, but that would require some modification to the Checkout page and I just wasn't interested in risking a 403 Forbidden during checkout.
For those who expressed interest, my apologies but I don't see a way to accomplish this without quite a bit of effort. It's definitely do-able, it just wouldn't be nearly as easy as I had hoped. Regardless, I still learned alot and that always pay dividends in the future
Several people have commented on how my Recent Orders Map (http://www.solunar.com/ordersmap.aspx) is really slick and they'd like to know if I could sell it as a user control for their site. So I sat down today (actually about 6:00am) and gave it a shot just for entertainment purposes.
The trick to any map like Google is that you have to feed it locations for each marker to represent. These can be in the form of Latitude/Longitude pairs or actual names like "Rushville, Indiana" or "Tower, MN 55790". While Lat/Long are the easiest and fastest, you don't have that information in an AC7 storefront.
Enter...Geocoding. This is a method in which literal names of a location are translated into their respective latitude/longitude coordinates. It's been around for a while but there's still a quite a bit of misconception about it. Geocoding takes a name and returns a lat/long. REVERSE (sometimes called Inverse) Geocoding takes a lat/long and returns the nearest literal name.
I have a unique situation in that my most specialized product is actually sold by latitude and longitude. This makes it a perfect candidate for a mapping system like Google Maps. That's how I'm able to show the Recent Orders Map - every marker represents a Solunar Fishing Times/Hunting Times order. What it doesn't show is all my regular product orders.
Geocoding using the .Net module I have for the Google Map on my site is incredibly simple. Unfortunately it's never going to work. Google imposes a per-IP daily limit on the number of GeoCoding requests. Since my site is going to get hit thousands of times, just having the last 25 orders geocoded is going to burn that limit up pretty quickly. Once the limit is hit, Google throws a 403 Forbidden error and the page crashes
Test Page (might not work): http://www.Solunar.com/test-GoogleMap.aspx
So, it was a great idea but it's not going to be possible. You could buy Googles Premier Map API service but that's going to add a monthly fee. You could buy a separate zip-code database, but again a monthly fee (and downloads) to keep it current will be required.
I considered Geocoding each order when it is initially saved, but that would require some modification to the Checkout page and I just wasn't interested in risking a 403 Forbidden during checkout.
For those who expressed interest, my apologies but I don't see a way to accomplish this without quite a bit of effort. It's definitely do-able, it just wouldn't be nearly as easy as I had hoped. Regardless, I still learned alot and that always pay dividends in the future
