Flashy Goodness

I take this moment to highlight the spectacular Flash world vigil map put together by the inimitable Mr. Eric Rodenbeck.

On the backend, we generate a handful of XML files to tell the flash app where the meetings are and which countries have images and/or comments. The whole mess is served up by the Tux kernel-accelerated webserver. Very fast.

Geolocating the meetings in the US was trivial. We’ve got a cheap, accurate database of zip code to longitude/latitude mappings.

Doing it internationally took a bit more clever. Ironically, the US Military helped solve the problem. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency provides a database of international (read: non-US) place names with latitude and longitude. After massaging these files into something a little more usable, we did best-effort matching on the country and placename and got over 90% of the vigils matched.