fine whine

So I was searching around for some sort of information on what happened to GeoURL, the proximity database for sites and pages that worked based on so-called ICBM coordinates. A GeoURL tag on a page would lead to all the other registered places nearby.

Inevitably this was a bunch of LJ and DeviantArt people, but not always. Lots of sites were slowly adding themselves to the database, and then...

GeoURL closed for renovations.

Well, that's a fine how-do-you-do, you might say--if you speak in the manner of folksy, down-home characters commonly played by William H. Macy in movies.

GeoURL being down mainly means that I don't have an easy way of knowing what DeviantArtists and other online folks have set up shop nearby. I suppose I'm okay with that, since I don't really like dealing with people in real life anyway.

Anyway, every now and then I'd make half-hearted attempts to track down any information at all about the ongoing status of GeoURL's so-called renovations. Most of the time I found only other half-hearted attempts and no answers.

This time around, though, I hit something similar to paydirt. On an email list dubbed Geowanking, one of the head honchos, Joshua Schachter posted this:

I'm looking for a new home for it, still. It needs a rewrite for
performance reasons and has considerable bandwidth and CPU
requirements...

Well, at least now I know. Nearby that information was a link to A2B.cc, which "offers a very similar service" amongst other things (by which I mean a search engine and GPS software and more).

I've only been playing with it a little bit but I've already added this page to it. I can't see much reason why anybody else wouldn't want to do the same with their web stuff.

Of course to really get the full experience I need to get some GPS equipment. Christmas is coming soon, after all.