Its official. As of today, all of our WordPress products are 100% Open source and available on github. We are shaking hands with every tentacle of the Octocat.

Check us out and fork us too!

 Welocally Places On Github   

 Welocally Places Mobile On Github   

The approach relies on identifying the “Featured Image”, which wordpress interprets by the ‘single-post-thumbnail’. See Featured Images Support for more info.

<li class="shareFacebook">
    <a rel="nofollow" 
    href="http://www.facebook.com/share.php?
      s=100
      &p[title]=<?php the_title();?>
      &p[url]=<?php the_permalink(); ?>
      <?php if (has_post_thumbnail( get_the_ID() )) : ?>
        <?php $image = 
           wp_get_attachment_image_src( 
             get_post_thumbnail_id( get_the_ID() ), 
             'single-post-thumbnail' ); ?>
        &p[images][0]=<?php echo $image[0]; ?>
      <?php endif; ?>
      &p[summary]=
       <?php echo 
         urlencode(substr(strip_tags(the_excerpt()), 0, 250)); 
       ?>" 
     title="Share this post on Facebook" 
     target="_blank">Facebook</a>
    </li>

Sadly these aspects of sharer.php are very poorly documented by facebook, the best documentation we have found on this is at daddydesign.com. Hope this helps.

photo by Daisyree Bakker

Great article on Streetfight, about filling ad space and very wise to mention Local Yokel Media which is probably the best fit of all for hyperlocal. The problem is that a hyperlocal publisher just doesn’t want to “fill inventory” especially with ads from adBright, where an ad might have little or nothing to do with the local area they serve. It seems ridiculous that there is empty inventory at all, local businesses should jump at the chance to partner with local publishers to fight off the advance of national brands and chains and grow reputation as a local and indie brand.

What these publishers need is a champion! They need a savvy outsourced sales force that they feed leads to who then close the deals and do the creative and provisioning. Think BuySell Ads with a salesforce. Some of them might worry, “am I loosing my customer?”  Well if having empty ad space that could be filled by real local businesses is your idea of loosing then maybe you should lose more.

I have used this story before but at the expensive of being repeating myself to make the point here goes..

Two hunters go on a hunting trip for bears. They go to the cabin; have a few laughs over whiskey the night before the big hunt. In the morning one bear hunter wakes up and hears his friend’s yells approaching “open the door! open the door!”, the hunter in the cabin opens the door to see his friend running towards the cabin with a 1000lb grizzly right behind him. As the friend runs in the cabin and through the back door he mentions: I caught it now you kill it

Hyperlocal publishers should be be the hunter with the bear running behind, and they should hire an outsourced salesforce and channel partners to be the hunter in the cabin.

Its two jQuery plugin widgets that use Google Maps V3, a Place Card Widget for single places, and a Multiplace Widget for maps with multiple places, like a category map or a location guide. It perfect for creating custom business directories, travel guides, or real estate guides that have flair an appeal that go beyond the standard Google Maps look and feel, and its super easy to use if you are a javascript developer.

We love the people at Google Maps, what a great foundation that makes so many things possible, and for many people it’s all they will ever need. We just decided we wanted to make it easy to do more advanced, interactive and stylized things with Google Maps and make simple with configurable widgets.

The real reason to consider using an alternative to the basic look of GMaps is your client.

If your client is happy with basic pin maps then make an embeddable map and you and your client can move on along. If your client wants beautiful interactive fully styled maps and doesn’t mind spending less than 20 dollars and about 30 mins of your time then we are a solution that makes it easy to make maps that integrate well with a site’s look and feel.

What is a Welocally Place?

Our widget’s basic data model is founded around the welocally places. Simply put, a place is all the relevant facts about a real world location, like its name, location, phone number, and website. This data is then used to set the map location and create place cards or marker maps.

//places are an array of JSON objects
var places = [
  {				                       
      "properties": {
          "phone": "+1 510 595 8000",
          "classifiers": [
              {
                  "category": "Restaurant",
                  "subcategory": "",
                  "type": "Food & Drink"
              }
          ],
          "titlelink": "http://oaklandly.com/sicily-pizza",
          "website": "http://www.sicilypizzapasta.com",
          "address": "138 14th St",
          "name": "Gourmet Sicily Pizza",
          "province": "CA",
          "owner": "welocally",
          "postcode": "94612",
          "country": "US",
          "city": "Oakland"
      },
      "geometry": {
          "type": "Point",
          "coordinates": [
              -122.2636,
              37.801379
          ]
      }
  }
];

Place Widget

The place widget creates a pin card for a specific place. It perfect for showcasing a specific location. Of course all of the Google Maps Capabilities work also, so users can use street view to get curb appeal quickly.

//config for the widget
var cfg = { imagePath: 'images/marker_all_base.png'};
 
//instantiate it
var placeWidget = 
  new WELOCALLY_PlaceWidget(cfg)
    .init();
 
//load loacally with local place
placeWidget.load(places[0]);

Multi Places Widget

The multi places widget will automatically scale to the correct view bounds to include all the place markers. When a user selects a specific place marker details like website or phone number and driving directions become visible and the map will center.

This map is great for creating a set of places with a specific category, such as “Shopping” or a travel map.

//used for the place display when selected (observed)
var placeSelected = new WELOCALLY_PlaceWidget();
 
//config the widget, use the places array
var cfg = { 
 id:'multi_map_1',
 imagePath: 'images/marker_all_base.png',
 observers:[placeSelected],
 places: places
};
 
//it both objects 
placeSelected.initCfg(cfg);
var placesMulti = 
	  new WELOCALLY_PlacesMultiWidget(cfg)
  		.init(); 
 
//setup the selected area, display selected
placesMulti.getSelectedArea().append(
  placeSelected.makeWrapper());

Developers Are Foundation

Because we are developers we think that the developer community for any technology company, even small ones like ours, is essential. That means we really want to get you involved and listen to your feedback. Make sure to join our mailing list for important updates and deals. If you use our products please tell us what you think, we love to hear how we can improve and make our product better. If you think we can do better please tell us. Trolls we can live without, but real feedback on ways that we can improve are an honor to receive.

• We listened to you, and you made our product better.
• We made everything widgets, and streamlined.
• Search should be simple, so we made it easier to find and add places.
• Quality, we are dedicated to quality so we tested it on more platforms and browsers.

New Look and Feel

We moved to a 100% javascript widget approach, it looks better, performs better and will work in more browsers. Let’s take a look at the new widgets shall we?

Place Posts

Making everything a tag has been super important to us, that is because we think every place in the world should have a unique ID, just like a URL on the web. Thats why we have made cool little widgets that can be shared.

Smarter Map Widget

Shouldnt it be easy for people to see all the similar place to the one they are reading about in one place? Our new Places Widget Map automatically filters the places that are related to either the category your reader is currently viewing or relates it to the category set for a specific post. When viewing the post on a local restaurant, only restaurants show in the map area.

The best plugin is the one that helps the most people possible. While we wont be able to help everybody at least we help many more people in this release. We worked very hard to support IE readership for this iteration. Here is the new matrix of browsers we support for viewing places:

Just so you know, we really are into indie sites. We wont stalk you or anything, but we are super passionate about helping indie site owners succeed. Mostly because we see them as the kind of people we look up too, fiercely independent, trying to make their own way. Just like us. We have some big plans to help sites like these monetize and be sustainable, we hope you will work with us to make it happen.

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meetups help local businesses

 
This is a completely a myth. I would say that digitally many of them are trying to innovate and use social marketing. For example “like us on facebook” is pervasive, but alas the challenges are greater than that. There utsa be this big yellow book you could just put your ad in, or offer a free meal to the local food journalist and that’s all you needed. Now there is a myriad of different streams you have to broadcast to and manage, Sprout Social, Klout, Foursquare, facebook, Groupon, Twitter, and now Pintrist! That’s overwhelming for a Mom & Pop who is juggling chain saws all day. I am sure there are startups just to solve the problem of startups now.

As a Mom & Pop you are small right? Well there are a ton of people who like you just for being that, so why are you trying to get involved in national media streams? You think a national advertising agency, facebook or Groupon care if your business succeeds? You are just inventory to them, but your local area blogger loves their community and really wants you to succeed. That’s why they are the perfect partner!

What’s *our* recommendation to the mom and pops for marketing? Go back to basics, get involved as a sponsor in the most widely read local/community blog and make a strong presence there. Sponsor partnered events that engage their readership, start or go to community meetup with them, partner on specials or deals that grow your brand as “indie” and “local”. Make your presence known in the community and choose only one or two other online marketing streams that provide the biggest reach in your area.