Overview

The Places Section options control the appearance of places. See the Place Index User Item for a description of the controls for the Place Index.

Place Levels

The place level selection options—the checkboxes whose names begin with "L" and a number—allow the user to choose which of the place levels (AKA place subfields) will be included in the output. If a place level is not checked, that data will not be included in the output pages.

The place level selection options affect place style output as follows. If a place level is checked and if that same place level is included in the output template for a place style, then the data for that place level will be included in the output. If a place level is not checked, then the data for that place level will not appear in the output even if the place level is included in the output template for the place style.

Place Format

The Place Format property controls whether the Full Place or Short Place format is used. As in TMG, the short place is either a literal string assigned to the place via the Master Place List (MPL), or, if that is empty, the short place is the result of interpreting the Short Place template which is defined in the TMG preferences.

The Full, then Short choice operates as follows. The first time a place is shown in a particular person entry, the full place is used as the value of [L]. For all subsequent references to the same exact place for the same person, the short place is used as the value of [L].

If the result of processing the Short Place rules (use the literal value, then use the template) is an empty place, then Second Site will substitute the full place. So, if the Short Place template is "<[L3],> <[L5],> <[L6]>" but the L3, L5, and L6 fields are empty, then Second Site will use the full place value.

Use Place Style

The Use Place Style checkbox controls whether the place style is used to format the place. When Use Place Style is checked, which is the default, the place is formatted using a combination of the output template for the place style assigned to the place and the place level selection options. When Use Place Style is unchecked, the place is formatted by concatenating the selected place subfields together, separated by a comma and a space.

Mapping Service Links

Second Site will add links to one or more mapping services. Links added via the properties in the Places Section appear at the end of place text that appears in the person page entry. The place links are added as part of the output of the [L] variable, or via the Second Site-only [SS-L-LINKS] variable.

You may enable or disable as many of the mapping services as you require.

As of January 2016, Second Site has two entries for Bing Maps, one for addresses in the USA and one for addresses outside the USA. There are two entries because URLs that include a country work better for places outside the USA than they do for places inside the USA. When using Bing Maps, I suggest you enable both.

Latitude / Longitude

TMG place records may include explicit latitude/longitude (LatLong) values, and mapping services will produce the most accurate maps for such locations. Second Site will include links to places without latitude / longitude values, and in those cases the mapping service will attempt to geocode the location. Geocoding is an imprecise process, and the result may or may not meet your expectations. Geocoding accuracy will vary based on

  • the quality of the address data,
  • the age of the address,
  • the quality of the mapping service's geocoding software, and
  • the depth of information the mapping service has for the given area.

Only Places with LatLong

When Only Places with LatLong is checked, Second Site will only create links for places with LatLong values. This avoids issues with geocoding accuracy and lets you hand-pick the places that include links. The default is checked.

You may use the [:PLACE-MAP-LINK:] code to override the Only Places with LatLong property.

Use Icon for Links

When Use Icon for Links is checked, Second Site will use the "ml.png" file as an icon to indidate a mapping service link. When unchecked, Second Site will use the first character of the mapping service name as the link text, and the text will be a superscript. The default is not checked.

You may prevent Second Site from adding a mapping service link to any place that has the special code [:NO-PLACE-MAP-LINK:] in any place part, or in the place comment.

You may specify [:PLACE-MAP-LINK:] in any place part, or in the place comment, to force the addition of a mapping service link. This code is useful when, for example, Only Places with LatLong is enabled, but you want specific places without LatLong coordinates to have mapping service links. Also, Second Site has filters to prevent the addition of mapping service links for places where geocoding is likely to fail. Second Site will ignore those filters when [:PLACE-MAP-LINK:] is present.

GEO-PLACE

You may add [GEO-PLACE:] / [:GEO-PLACE] in any place part, or in the place comment, to specify the text to be geocoded by the mapping service for a particular place.

Derived Country

Second Site generates a "derived country" field based on values in the place record. The derived country value is used during the generation of mapping service links. The derived country value is not passed to mapping services, it is only used to determine which URLs to generate.

For the following countries, Second Site compares variations of the country name to the input value and standardizes the name to the values shown:

  • AUSTRALIA
  • CANADA
  • MEXICO
  • UK
  • USA

For example, if the Country field in the place record is "CAN", "CA", or "Canada", the derived country value will be "CANADA". Also, if the Country field is empty, but the State field is "Nova Scotia" or "NS", the the derived country value will be "CANADA".

Second Site generates the derived country value to allow the creation of country-specific mapping service URLs. As mentioned above, Bing Maps appears to generate better geocoding results for addresses in the United States when the country is not included in the URL, but addresses outside the USA are geocoded more accurately if the country is included. Other mapping services are limited to specific countries, and linking to them for countries outside their coverage area will produce errors.

Place Data Entry

For the best results, always specify as much detail as you can when entering place data in TMG. If you do not want to include some of the place data in the output text, single-exclude the place level by using a hyphen as a prefix for the value. For example, if you put "-USA" in the Country field, Second Site will not include the "USA" in the output text, but it will include "USA" in the place lookup query passed to the mapping service if that will produce the optimal result.

Place Styles

Second Site supports TMG v5+ Place Styles. The Place Style determines the format of the [L] sentence variable when Use Place Style is checked. The other sentence variables, such as [DETAIL], [CITY], etc., always refer to a predefined level of the place data, and their content is not determined by the definition of the place style.

Second Site has optimized code to handle place styles that are referenced like this, "<[City], >", i.e., a conditional reference with a trailing comma and space. If you use custom place styles, use the same reference style for the best performance in Second Site.

Remember... you cannot use custom place labels in sentences. If you are using a custom place style, you may find it easier to use the [L1] through [L10] variables to refer to place data.

Copyright © 2022 by John Cardinal
This page last changed on 16 Dec 2019.
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