Normalize messy address input before geocoding it
Cleaning up obvious formatting problems before you geocode an address improves match quality without costing you a single extra request.
My Geocode blog (page 21)
Notes on geocoding, IP data, and building on the My Geocode API.
Older posts
Address parsing ambiguity: apartments, units and PO boxes
A single address string can hide several distinct pieces of meaning, and the same abbreviation can mean different things in different countries. Parsing it correctly is harder than it looks.
Coordinating a remote team across time zones
A twelve-person team spread across four continents kept scheduling meetings that landed at midnight for someone, until it started tracking real time zones instead of rough offsets.
Drop-in compatibility with PositionStack is live
PositionStack-shaped requests now resolve against our compatible host with matching fields, so an integration can switch with only a host name and key.
Why documentation quality matters more than feature count
A feature you cannot figure out how to use might as well not exist at all. Documentation is not a support cost, it is part of the actual product.
Migrating from ipinfo.io
ipinfo.io's compact loc and org fields shaped a lot of downstream code. Here is what a migration to a compatible drop-in host preserves.
Validate a postal code before you save it
Confirm a postal code actually resolves to a real place before it goes into your database, using a single lookup against the right country code.
Building a weather app that starts from a visitor's location
A weather app wanted to show today's forecast the instant a page loaded, before a visitor had typed a single letter of their city name.
Coordinate reference systems: why WGS84 is the default
Every set of coordinates is defined relative to some model of the Earth's shape. WGS84 became the default for GPS and web mapping for practical reasons worth understanding.
Drop-in compatibility with Geocodio is live
A compatibility host for Geocodio now reproduces its request and response format exactly, so an existing integration only needs a new host and key.
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