By Ayush SaranThe first time you visit craigslist.org [i.e. cookie free] you are presented with their global homepage.The page lists about 150 craigslist sub-sites based on location and allows you to pick the location nearest you.
For US visitors it takes an extra click to pick the state you are located in and then the craigslist city you are looking for.
With the vast numbers of IP based geo-location services available, we could approximate the vistors location and offer to take them directly to the relevant website for their city/state/country.
Our Craigslist.org Home Page Mockup
This is a working example, try it. Using the free GeoLite database your IP is matched to a city and then the page offers to take you directly to your city’s craigslist.org page or to see all locations available in that state.
You can test the page against different locations by adding an IP address in the url, using the format city.php?ip=’XXX.XX.XXX.XX’. Replace the X’s with any IP
[ex.- 69.17.112.38]
This demo took under 15 mins to put together, including posting the screenshots to the dt flickr account. So it’s not something that would take craigslist, or any website too long to implement.
About the Demo
The demo locates US visitors only, based on IP.
The links to the states are accurate 99% of the time.
The links to the cities may not work, the list of cities is minimal and may not work for some towns and cities, this is a limitation of the demo, not the technology.
This is an example to illustrate geo location , not work done for/with craigslist. They are known for their refusal to change, and not expect to implement this or any other enhancements anytime soon. While that is disappointing , its refreshing to see a website not using gradients and shiny buttons.
Comments 7
I wish CL would use this. I hate hunting for my city in a huge list of other cities.
Awww… no La Mesa CL. Too bad. Cool example guys!
wow LA Mesa? I’m in PB! Haha nice!
Didn’t work for me, even if http://www.ipaddresslocation.org/ showed me a correct german flag and knew my city. Might be a german “Umlaut” problem, cool service anyway!
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The problem with this method is that google will only allow 15k geocode hits per day to pass through their server…this would quickly get eaten up by this code…another solution is php based and links the lat and long to the users IP address and sets a cookie or session var for that user that can be reused…and compare the lat and long to other users nearby so that say one set of IP’s from a particular city can be reused over and over again using the same lat and long…BTW I have already done this code…ty very much
Yah good Idea. That’s why I simply bookmarked my city.
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