http://blog.shadyproject.net/articles/tag/geonames?tag=geonames en-us 40 Stuff. And Things. <p>The <a href="http://code.google.com/p/ruby-geonames/">geonames ruby gem</a> is a really useful piece of software that makes it super easy to query the <a href="geonames.org">geonames</a> web services. I just used it in a distributed systems project (more on that later) and I found it to be great. Today, however, in a fit of "oh-sweetjesus-the-server-is-down-before-my-demo" panic, I ended up purchasing some credits for the commercial geonames service, only to find that the geonames gem doesn't actually have the facility to use the paid service. So I added the functionality myself. It was actually pretty simple (the it only required changes to two files) and I think it could be used by more people then just myself who have a paid geonames account.</p> <p>The two patches are attached to this article, and also posted on the <a href="http://code.google.com/p/ruby-geonames/issues/detail?id=6">issues page</a> for the gem at google code. </p> <p>I'm also working on adding support for the countryInfo webservice in the gem.</p> <p>Stay tuned.</p> Fri, 02 May 2008 20:30:00 -0700 urn:uuid:21020afb-4f6a-4cd3-b159-7233ec138ed2 Shady http://blog.shadyproject.net/articles/2008/05/02/geonames-gem Ruby ruby gem geonames patch