Category: mapping

New Geocoding for European Countries

Yahoo Maps Added Recently added support for geocoding in Europe. Now you can geocode and get map coordinates for these countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, France, and Italy

It appears there is somewhat limited support for these countries: Albania, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, The Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia/Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey

I’ve tried geocoding international addresses in these countries with our batch geocoder and it worked great! Just use the “State” field as a country when geocoding outside of the U.S. / Canada. Here’s a few addresses I tried and got back street block level coordinates:

However it should work for all countries listed above. Please test this with your own data and post back your findings here.

Faster Geocoding

Thanks to SR of http://www.cheapps.org for a performance tip: Turn off visbility on the bottom textarea field before Geocoding begins to speed things up.

Before Firefox 2.0 I didn’t find a big performance difference with updating the TextArea field in real-time and displaying it. Looked “cool” to me so I kept it. But when Firefox 2 came out they added a spell check feature to all textarea fields and the spellcheck process seems to slowdown writes to the textarea field when a lot of data is used.

Anyway, thanks for the tip!

New Feature: Different Colored Markers / Grouping

As of last night I’ve added the ability for map markers to be colored based on a “Group” field. You can create up to 6 different values for the Group field and each will display in a different color. A legend will be added below the map that shows the description of each group and the color of the markers in that group.

The colors are: orange, blue, green, purple, red, and yellow.

You can enable this feature by selecting a “Group By” column when creating your map. If you do not wish to group by a certain field, do not include a “Group” column in your source data and/or select “Don’t Group” in the Map Fields section.

For awhile now people have been asking for a way to change marker color. I think this is the most straightforward way to allow maps with different categories of markers. Here is an example map showing multiple groupings:

Apple Stores Grouping Example

Let me know if you have any feedback for this feature by posting comments below. Thanks!