Posted by liabo on December 31, 2008 at 4:02pm
Hey all, I have an interesting issue. I'm building a site for a newspaper that deals with a large region of the state, but wants to make sure that the content is very specific to each town within that region. So that when a visitor comes to the site, they see town-specific content.
I know that we could filter this out by using Location or just putting a field in their profile and adding it to Taxonomy and filtering it according to user. But what we'd really like to have happen is when they get to the page, have the zip code somehow "sniffed out" and have the page respond accordingly. Is this possible? If not, what do you think some of the options could be without having the users create a profile?
Comments
Vague answer
You could do it by IP. It's not 100% reliable because of proxies and such but a lot of sites use it. There's some database that relates IP to location and they get all the way down to some fairly small towns. From there you could either redirect to a local page or use ajax to reload the parts that you want location specific.
I know that's fairly vague but maybe will give you a direction. :)
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Use browser cookie
You could possibly store that last selected region in a cookie and check for and display that region when he visits next. But for this the user must not have cleared the cookies.
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
GeoIP is the technology.
There's a couple modules using it to customize content in some way.
http://drupal.org/project/ip_locator
http://drupal.org/project/ad_geoip
http://drupal.org/node/45806
Unfortunately, none look like they do exactly what you want out-of-the-box but could give you a headstart on pursuing a custom solution.
As mentioned, IP address is not an entirely accurate way of determining someone's location so you'd still want to have some means for the user to override the IP.
Fabulous
I'll have to work on getting the ip to target closer than country, but that's definitely the direction I want to head.
Maybe I could dig up a field of IPs for the region (would you get those from the isp?) then have it associate down based on what range they fall into. The areas may be so small I'd need to do a zip search anyway, but this would be a way more seamless, interesting and fun method. Plus, if properly done, it could be used on a larger scale for language/country specific content.
Ideally I'd like the content creators to be able to just do a taxonomy tag on article according to region name.
Anyway, just brainstorming. Thanks for the help everybody!
--erica
--erica ^-^
IP goes very local
I don't know where they get the database but http://www.feedjit.com/ gets me to my exact village, which is just under 8K people. Google Analytics can pinpoint visitors to the town as well.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
Not hyperlocal enough
You're not going to get hyperlocal out of IP mapping except in a few odd cases. The address will, at best, map to an office of an Internet service provider, which may not be anywhere near the actual subscriber. Your best bet is to combine user profiles (for registered user/contributors/commenters) with an easy "cookie my location" interface, such as you see on sites like msnbc.com.
Nope
It goes more local than that. My ISP's closest office is in Onalaska and my IP frequently resolves to the Eau Claire office as that's where their servers are and yet it pin points me to Holmen. I look at the GA for Wisconsin since my site is local and it pinpoints users to many small towns in the area. So it's getting the information from somewhere.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
try Domain Access
I'm working on a similar concept for my magazine website and using the Domain Access module...it's a little work getting it set up, but seems to be the most promising for this kind of functionality.
Plug
Domain Access was written for newspapers (and magazines) that have this kind of publishing model. You would still need to use some manner of cookie or registration system to send users to the correct content, however.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
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