We are still looking into fixing the reverse geocoding 620 errors, so be patient with us there. (see update below)

Please let me know if you keep receiving errors or other issues. I’ll keep looking into making the service more stable and reliable. Your feedback counts.

Cheers.

Update: I just found another data source for both regular geocoding and reverse geocoding, so hopefully that will clear up the 620 error codes for good.  Again, let me know if you run into any more.

Again, you are why we do this.

So, thank you for being so nice when we’ve struggled.

Here’s why we went down:

• It started with some crazy database crashes, which we fixed quickly by increasing the number of connections allowed to the database.
• After quite a few more times of needing to restart the database service and apache… and scratching of our heads… we finally figured out that the reason the database was continually crashing was that we had run out of space on our hard drive.  That crashed the database, did nutty things to the tables, and more.
• So, we added some notifications and enabled some restrictions so that we get alerts now when we get close to capacity.  The nice thing is the table in question is just a data repository – not needed for operating anything – so we just backed it up for posterity, emptied the table, and voila, we’re under capacity and everything’s back to normal.

What we did find out in the process was that we hit 26 million queries.  That’s just crazy.  With this kind of service, having to do this type of maintenance every 1-2 months is doable, but not really on my top list of things I want to do on a Saturday.

Thus, we’ve come to this… we’re considering how to monetize this service so that we can pay for either moving into the cloud or increasing our service at our outstanding host.

If you have any ideas – things you’re willing and wanting to pay for – we’re all ears.  Paying for the service, even in small chunks for the biggest users, would be a huge step up for stability.  “All for one, and one for all.”  We’re for you.

Bring your thoughts … we want to hear them.

Now, because you’ve been so amazing as a community, I’d love to get your feedback. I’ve been racking my brain on what I could potentially do to help you more. Tonight I came upon an idea and I wanted to see what you all thought.

The Question for Geo Coder Application Developers

The open ended question is… What else can we build for you?

The more direct question/idea I had was whether or not statistics would be helpful for you? Similar to Bit.ly or Su.pr and their url shortening, I thought perhaps you would like to know things related to your apps geo-coding like:

• Regions, countries, states, etc, are being geocoded the most?
• How often your API key (if we made one for you for trackability) is being used? (how many queries has your app hit us with?)
• What IP addresses are using your API key?
• What regions, countries, states, etc, are using your API key?

That’s just some of the ideas I came up with off the top of my head and some of them might not be useful at all since I would assume you might be tracking this data yourself. But if you liked these and/or had any other ideas that you’d like to see, I’d love to hear what they are.

So? What else can I do for you?  What would be the most valuable stat or service I could produce using this information for you?

This evening, I implemented JSONP support into the Tiny Geo-Coder API (JSONP in Wikipedia). So, now, as the documentation explains, if you send a querystring variable titled “callback” with the value being whatever function name you’re wanting to use, you’ll receive it back, wrapping the geo coordinates (or location, if you’re doing reverse geo-coding) in your function.

David explains the use case for this best:

The beauty of this is that it allows you to use the API in AJAX apps without running into problems with the same-origin policy.

So, there you have it. Go run off and create some awesome AJAX apps and report back to me what you’re doing so I can give you some props here on the blog.

Cheers,

Nate Ritter

That’s freaking amazing. I honestly still laugh at the simplicity of the app and think it’s hilarious that people are even using it. But, at the same time, I fully understand how much it’s needed now.

In case you didn’t get that, it’s been about 6 months and we’ve had 13 million queries on our API (if you can even call it that). That translates to about 3,000 queries per hour or 50 queries per minute. I’m actually amazed we haven’t gone down more often or run into the infamous “620″ error more. I mean, I know it’s simple, but still. I’ve never personally created anything (by myself) that’s gotten this much use before.

Regardless of how that gets me all up in an excited tizzy, the real thanks goes out to you! Thank you for using the service. Thank all of you who have given feedback and suggestions. Thank you for linking to this site, writing stories about it, blogging about it, and spreading the word. Thank you for thinking it’s useful and using it. You deserve 13 million thank you notes.. but don’t worry, I won’t spam you with that.

Please, as always, let me know what I can do to help you with your app. Also, please don’t be shy in letting me know what you’re doing with it. I would love to start highlighting people’s projects and companies who are using the service. I’d love to share the “thank you” with some link love and press for ya.

Thanks again! Keep on geocoding!

Nate Ritter, Web Chef