Geocoding service (Read 151 times)

Hi all,

Last night., I was informed that the search running routes by location function was broken. When you enter a location, it needs to be converted into a latitude/longitude pair so that the software would know where to look for maps.  Ever since this feature was added some 5 to 7 years ago, the conversion (geocoding) was provided by Yahoo, for free.

It turned out that Yahoo had discontinued their free geocoding service several days ago.  Their new service charges $6 per 1,000 location look ups.  They changed the format of the data so I had to rewrite the processing code.  Since I had to rewrite no matter what, I switched to use Google's geocoding service, which is free and might even work a little better.

The geocoding service outage also affected your calendar widget.  If you added a calendar widget in the last several days, it probably did not find a weather station so you should give it a try again.  The new geocoding code hasn't been well tested, but I figure it can't be any worse than not working at all.  As always, let me know if you encounter any problems.  Thanks!

eric

And here I thought it was just me... Thanks Eric!