Tag Archives: Places

Apr 15

Search for Businesses Using Phone Number

I tend to focus on searching for places with a what / where search–the where being a latitude / longitude, address, zip code, neighborhood and metro area.  But there is another quick way to search for a business, using the phone number.

The CityGrid Places Detail Search lets you search for business just by providing a phone number.

Here is an example search for Casa Bianca Pizza in Los Angeles:

All you have to provide is the phone number minus and dashes, spaces or other special characters, the client IP address and your publisher code.

It’s a pretty quick and dirty way to do a search for a business if you don’t know the location.

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Places API

Apr 3

New CityGrid Template for WordPress Directory Plugin

I just pushed an update for the CityGrid WordPress Directory Plugin. The WordPress Plugin lets any WordPress site owner to launch a business directory for their site, allowing them to choose the business categories they wish to display.

For example, if you want to show pizza, burgers, seafood and chinese food in your neighborhood you can launch the plugin, choose your categories, enter your city, neighborhood or zip code and it automatically adds a directory to your menu with the categories you wish to display.

The plugin has been around for a month, but it had a pretty basic look and feel, I wanted it to look better. Last week took the HTML and CSS template for CityGrid, cleaned it up and turned it into a template for any developer to use when deploying a local web directory.

I want my WordPress users to take advantage of this, so this week I added it to the CityGrid WordPress Directory Plugin. While doing this I also added a framework, allowing users to choose from multiple templates, meaning I will be adding more UI templates in the future.

I am almost done, adding the same template to the CityGrid WordPress Local Search Plugin today and committing the changes for everyone to take advantage of.

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City / Places API / Platforms

Mar 24

CityGrid Places HTML and CSS Template

When I first started working with the CityGrid Places API, I built my Hyp3rl0cal project, which is a basic business directory, with versions in PHP, Python and Ruby.

While building Hyp3rL0cal I wanted to show as much of the data returned from the CityGrid Places API search and detail. So both the listings and detail page are pretty bland and just show what gets returned from the places API.

I just finished my second WordPress plugin, and the listing and detail pages need to look better. So I created  the first template for business listings and detail page. I “borrowed” the HTML / CSS “look and feel” from the new CityGrid search engine. I cleaned it up, generalized it and published to Github for forking or download.

Your welcome to download and use in your own applications. It should be pretty straightforward to deploy. I will be offering it as a template option for both the CityGrid WordPress Directory Plugin and the CityGrid WordPress City Search Plugin.

I am going to build other templates, hopefully coming up with a lot of different configurations. Let me know if you have a template you’d like to share.

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Templates

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