NOTE, FROM THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE: Success!

NOTE, FROM THE LATER FUTURE: Posts like these are basically useless. If the upgrade hadn’t been successful, you wouldn’t even see anything!

That is all.

I will freely admit that I probably have at least the second worst URL in the history of the earth planet.

But

In my defense: I was computing under the influence when I registered it, and all the good ones were taken.

Anyway

In keeping with the times, I have looked into this whole URL shortening thing that’s been taking several of the internets by storm. And so I present, for your ease of use and mine, something that would fit on a business card to be handed out to babes:

http://bit.ly/wwwhatever (wwwowsers that’s short!)

Since I couldn’t figure out a free/painless way to edit a million photos’ EXIF data, I made a shortcode instead, and will just enter locations by hand in the post.

The basics

I put this in my theme’s functions.php file:

function geotag($atts) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		'n' => '41.000',   # default value if none entered in shortcode
		'w' => '-93.000',  # default value if none entered in shortcode
		't' => 'Earth',    # default value if none entered in shortcode
		'z' => '16',       # default value if none entered in shortcode
	), $atts));

	# do it
	return "Location: {$n}&deg; N, {$w}&deg; E (<a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?q={$n}+{$w}&#038;t=h&#038;z={$z}&#038;output=embed">Gmap!</a>)";
}
add_shortcode('geo', 'geotag');

And the shortcode looks like this:

[geo t="The Space Needle" n="47.620484" w="-122.349544" z="19"]

A-and typing THAT into your post (or image caption) gives you THIS:

Location: 47.620484° N, -122.349544° E (Gmap!)

NOTES:

1. The highlighted portion in the code snippet is for a no-whitespace, all map view of the Gmap (good for popups or iframes).
2. Go here to learn all about the parameters for Google Maps URLs. That’s what I did.
3. This post probably won’t be much help if you know even less php than me. If you click all the links, it will explain the rest of it better than I can. (I am mostly writing all this down in case I suffer a blow to the head and suddenly forget everything.)
4. The default coordinates are a reference to the greatest song ever recorded.
5. ????
6. Profit!

Getting fancy

There are a few different ways you can display the map info, all of which I’ve tried, and only one of which I liked. I’ll save that one for last.

A regular old link

Since I hate popups so much, and had a long stretch where I couldn’t get the thickbox/iframe method to work, I settled for this:

return "Location: {$n}&deg; N, {$w}&deg; E (<a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?q={$n}+{$w}&#038;ll={$n},{$w}&#038;t=h&#038;z={$z}\"
	target=\"_blank\" title=\"{$t} (opens in new window, sorry)\">Gmap!</a>)";

A popup

If you don’t hate popups, and don’t think any of your readers will mind, here you go (note the use of the optional bits from the original snippet):

return "Location: {$n}&deg; N, {$w}&deg; E (<a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?q={$n}+{$w}&#038;ll={$n},{$w}&#038;t=h&#038;z={$z}&#038;output=embed\"
	onclick=\"window.open('http://maps.google.com/maps?q={$n}+{$w}&#038;ll={$n},{$w}&#038;t=h&#038;z={$z}&#038;output=embed','popup','width=800,height=600,scrollbars=no,resizable=no,toolbar=no,directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=no,left=20,top=20'); return false\"
	title=\"{$t} (popup, sorry)\">Gmap!</a>)";

Getting really fancy (Updated July 2010)

This is the one that gave me so much grief trying to figure out. It requires jquery and shadowbox to work, and displays the map in a purty iframe, with none of the problems thickbox had.

Edit the “do it” part:

return "Location: {$n}&deg; N, {$w}&deg; E (<a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?q={$n}+{$w}&#038;ll={$n},{$w}&#038;t=h&#038;z={$z}&output=embed\" rel=\"shadowbox;width=800;height=600;\" title=\"{$t}\">Gmap!</a>)";

You can, of course, set the width and height to whatever you want, or accept the shadowbox defaults.

Oh, just stop it (Updated July 2010)

So, what if you want to make an inline link, like, with text?

function igeotag($atts) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		'l' => 'linkytext',   # default value if none entered in shortcode
		'n' => '41.000',      # default value if none entered in shortcode
		'w' => '-93.000',     # default value if none entered in shortcode
		't' => 'Earth',       # default value if none entered in shortcode
		'z' => '16',          # default value if none entered in shortcode
	), $atts));

	# do it
	return "<a href=\"http://maps.google.com/maps?q={$n}+{$w}&#038;ll={$n},{$w}&#038;t=h&#038;z={$z}&output=embed\" rel=\"shadowbox;width=800;height=600;\" title=\"{$t}\">{$l}</a>";
}
add_shortcode('igeo', 'igeotag');

And the shortcode looks like this:

[igeo l="SWEET" t="The Space Needle is hella sweet" n="47.620484" w="-122.349544" z="19"]

Which results in the word SWEET being a link!

Disclaimer

I suck at html, css, php, making any of the aforementioned valid, and the less mentioned about my documentation skills the better. So if anything blows up, it’s your problem (but I do reserve the right to laugh at you).

PS

On the next page is some outdated info I didn’t want to just chuck.

• Handy
• A pain in the ass to do after the fact

I’m working on it. Not really, but kind of.

NOTE, FROM THE FUTURE: I’m probably about as caught up on tags as I’m going to be. That still amounts to “not very”, but that’s all you get.

[...]

NOTE, FROM THE FUTURE: I completely rewrote this, to account for new developments in the realm of me-being-less-stupid.

Go here for that stuff, now and forever: Geotagging, for real this time

I’m also seeing weird shutter-speed displays sometimes, but I don’t care enough about that right now.

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE EASY, PEOPLE#$P&!@#^

In good news, I can (sort of) geotag now. It only took about six hours of bashing my head on the keyboard.

[...]

NOTE, FROM THE FUTURE: I completely rewrote the geotagging stuff, to account for new developments in the realm of me-being-less-stupid.

Go here for that stuff, now and forever: Geotagging, for real this time

“But I was not notified!” I said to myself. Then I remembered that when I registered it I gave them my old gmail address, the one I quit using when I got gmail styles on my inter-Smeat. I checked, and lo and behold there were lots of mails, starting with “domain expiring in two months” to “domain expiring in five minutes” to “we’re not going to hold on to this forever, you know” to “PAY UP, DIPSHIT!”

So anyway, what’d I miss while I was gone?