Search for journal entries by location!

Continuing our quest to implement the most fully featured community mapping site available, we just completed location-based searching of journal entries on MyOutdoors.net. This feature integrates into the site extremely well, with lots of different options for finding journal entries.

To start, there is now a link at the bottom of every journal entry that says "Find nearby journal entries." It's right next to the distance field and looks like this:

The link will take you to the location search page to display all of the journal entries that are close by. It currently uses a default search radius of 150 miles (apologies to all you metric folks out there). It's kind a wide range, but we thought that you would want to see something rather than nothing, and for journal entries out in the middle of nowhere, it could be useful. Also, they're sorted by distance so the closest ones show up first. Once you're on the search page, you can change the search radius, or enter new search criteria.

Search criteria can be anything that Google can geocode, including cities, states, zip codes, etc. You can even enter a longitude and latitude. One of the cool things about it is that if you could link to the location page directly, passing in three parameters in the querystring. Just use http://www.myoutdoors.net/location.php? The parameters are:

lat (in degrees)
lng (in degrees)
distance

And then you can see all the journal entries that took place nearby.

There is also a new Location-based Search box on the Browse page. This is the entry to the location search for other search criteria.

Enjoy!