New from PHPRiot today, there's this new tutorial showing you how to combine a PHP interface with the Google Maps API to do some geocoding of your own.

Geocoding is the process of finding the longitude and latitude of a given address or location. The Google Maps service gives developers and web site owners free access to their geocoder, both using the Google Maps JavaScript API, as well as using the web service. In this article I will show you how to access the geocoder web service using PHP so that it can be used in your own applications.

The tutorial walks you through every step of the way - from getting your Google API ID to making a simple request all the way out to using placemarks to store locations to fetch later on.

This is a great, very detailed summary that anyone wanting to work with the Google API in PHP should definitely check out.

The OC Food Review blog has posted part one of a two part series covering the creation of a location-based search engine. They're currently implementing it into their site and wanted to share the knowledge.

Conceptually, location based searching is pretty straight-forward: find out where you are, find out how far you're willing to travel, and compare your location against the locations of all your choices. If the distance between where you are and what you're interested in is less than what you're willing to travel, add it to your results list. Simple, right? Right.

He talks more about the concepts behind the search and one of the keys to the entire process - geocoding. They opted to go with the Yahoo! Maps API to grab this information. There's some sample REST urls and the output of the results after they've been unserialized.

They've even created their own class to make things even simpler. It does require that you have cURL installed with your PHP5 installation, but outside of that, there are no other dependencies.