Intro

Hello Steemians,

Creating a Web Map App with all Steemians locations might not seem like a super complex project, however, due to my lack of experience in Python and backend web design, I am forced to keep good track of my steps and take every single decision carefully.

The motivation behind is promoting meetups and user-to-user interaction . Hopefully, with this app users will easily find other Steemians in their neighborhood/area whether using a distance or province/country filtering.

With this roadmap I would like to describe the steps and challenges I have found so far in the current project that I am involved with.

Concept

Finding a map service
Retrieving locations from SteemData Server
Feeding Map with locations
Enabling Map filter feature

Map Service Choice

There are many possibilities out there, many are free but are usually limited by the amount of geolocations uses per day.

I was deciding between one of the following:

pubnub	infosniper	batchgeo
yahoo	google

Since most services are limited, I decided to going for google maps because of the extensive and good quality of its documentation.

User Location Data Retrieval

The first step was finding a way to get all locations within the blockchain. My solution was using MongoDB and SteemData by Furion (https://steemit.com/steemdata/@furion/getting-started-with-steemdata).

Feeding Map with locations

This is the tricky part. Since I do not want to pay the subscription for unlimited geolocations calls, I have two possibilities:

• Get geolocations locally from a dictionary and create a database embedding all user location coordinates
• Get a separated geolocation service that feeds my webmap

Since I decided beforehand running the backend in Python, I chose the great tool "Geopy" as a remote geolocation service (running in Python). For the rest of the processes, I will be running Python3 and additionally the Pymongo module for the Database management.

Testing code so far:

from geopy.geocoders import Nominatim

import datetime

from steemdata import SteemData
geolocator = Nominatim()
from pymongo import MongoClient
client = MongoClient('localhost', 27017)
db = client.test_database
collection = db.test_collection
data2 = []

s = SteemData()

data = s.Accounts.aggregate(

[

{
   "$match": {
            "profile.location": { "$exists": "true", "$ne": "null" }
        }
    },
    { 
    "$project":
    {
        "account":"$account",
        "location":"$profile.location",
        "_id":0
    }},
    {"$limit":5},
])

for element in data:

    print(element["location"])
    location = geolocator.geocode(element["location"])
    data["location"] = location
    print((location.latitude, location.longitude))

Please feel free to comment and suggest. I will post the final web url as soon as the app is ready. Thanks for reading.

-lightproject