I decided to try to add a FeedMap to my site yesterday – a feedmap is a map you can add to the sidebar of your blog showing where you are based and showing other bloggers in your locale if they have Geotagged their webpages.

The first thing you need to do is to find your geographic coordinates – I looked up my location and found that my longitude and latitude data are N51 50.789, W8 19.230 (format – WGS84 decimal degrees). I found these coordinates here.

These data can be converted to decimal degrees here.

When I entered the data into feedmap (lat = 51.8536; long = 8.324847):

Feedmap interpreted that data as North Rhine Westfalia (Germany)!

Well, at least now I have an excuse for my not visiting my parents as often as they’d like!

I added Geo tags to the headers of this site using Andrew Turner’s very clear instructions on the Linux Journal site to try to get FeedMap to update my position but it failed to recognise the tags.

Doubtless I messed up the process somewhere along the way but Feedmap should make it easier to correct errors when they do occur. So for now it looks like I’m stuck in Germany – well, at least the beer will be good!