getting users geolocation via html5 and javascript

Question

I am trying to get the users geolocation via the html5 geolcation api, and i use the following snippet for it:

if (navigator.geolocation) {
    var timeoutVa         


        

Answer 1

You can use this online service to get the lat lng easily:

http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/javascript

Regarding the timeout, I don't think there's a way to interfere with the browsers permission mechanism (as in, to close that permission popup after a certain amount of seconds) - though I would gladly be proven wrong. What you could do would be to set a timer and after three seconds, get the IP based geolocation and set the map to it (or, refresh the page after 3 seconds, and set a cookie that triggers the IP based geo and not the HTML5 geo, but that's a bit over the top if you ask me).

Then, if they give permission, it would refresh the map with the HTML5 geolocation (which should be much more accurate). You can also encapsulate the IP geo fallback into a function and use it if they don't have HTML5 geolocation or they hit deny.

Here's a fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/mfNCn/1/

Here's the rough cut from the fiddle:

...
var time_perm = window.setTimeout(get_by_ip, 3000);
...
function get_by_ip() {
    var lat = geoip_latitude();
    var lng = geoip_longitude();
    map_it(lat, lng);
}
...
function map_it(lat,lng) {
    // build your map here
}

(I hesitate to put the whole code chunk onto here, as it's rather lengthy, so check the fiddle for the rest and full implementation)