Geocoding 1000 posts on WordPress – 50% success

After I had finished categorising all the posts on Mappery (see this post) it occurred to me that a similar strategy might be used for geocoding ungeocoded posts. If you have been following my vibe coding posts you will know that Arnaud and I built a geocoding and mapping plugin for our WordPress site that we are about to publish. When we built the plugin, I salvaged the geocodes from the old plugin that we had disabled but that left nearly 1,000 posts ungeocoded (either posts from before the first plugin was installed or posts that had no meaningful location). I decided to try the same approach of parsing the posts’ text for a location reference and then falling back to image assessment to see if the image suggested a location, once I had some location references extracted from the posts I planned to fire these at OpenCage to get coordinates. Here is a summary of the approach: I asked Claude to read through the text of every one of those ~1,000 posts to work out where the map was…