In the upper right corner ExploreOurPla.net now has a location detector. It displays the location of the center of the map and provides a labeled permalink ready for your bookmarks and mails.
After every move ExplorerOurPla.net connects to geonames.org, sends the current coordinates and retrieves country, city and administration regions whenever appropriate from the hierarchy service at geonames.org. Of course in the middle of an ocean or a lake no results are available and the coordinates are used instead.
The geonames.org service tries to find a city within a radius of 50 kilometer, otherwise an uninhabited place is indicated. For the US the resolution goes down to street level. The administration regions are available for a lot of countries and help to disambiguate cities with same name in same country.
You may drag the link inside the location detector on your desktop or into your list of bookmarks. It is automatically labeled correctly, so in future you have no longer learn by heart the coordinates of your places of interest.
The location detector works very fast and gives result within milliseconds. It works in both FireFox and Internet Explorer (tested with FF 1.5 and IE 6.0). All enabled extensions, tools and overlays from your current view are included with the permalink. Unregistered users also have a small Google AdSense window attached to the detector.
Update:
There is now a tutorial and code available desribing how to implement labeled permalinks with your map. Download the all-in-one-file solution with AJAX requester, example and Javascript.
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