Visitors must select their city first. How to approach this?

Rails
1

Hi guys.

I have an app where visitors can see offers in their cities. So a
visitor
must select his city first in order to access the app (much like
Groupon,
using just a cookie though).

How should I approach this? I mean,right now what I’m doing is I have
the
action for the homepage (which lists all offers) and a before_filter
applied to it, which redirects the user if no cookie is found. Is this
the
right way though?

2

I have an app where visitors can see offers in their cities. So a visitor must
select his city first in order to access the app (much like Groupon, using just a
cookie though).

How should I approach this? I mean,right now what I’m doing is I have the action
for the homepage (which lists all offers) and a before_filter applied to it, which
redirects the user if no cookie is found. Is this the right way though?

It would work, but you might look at Maxmind’s geoip lite city
database… if no cookie is found, look them up and try to get close.
Much nicer experience to say guess their city with a little link to let
them change it if you guessed wrong…

http://www.maxmind.com/app/geolitecity

-philip

3

On 19 March 2012 15:38, Agis A. [email protected] wrote:

Hi guys.

I have an app where visitors can see offers in their cities. So a visitor
must select his city first in order to access the app (much like Groupon,
using just a cookie though).

How should I approach this? I mean,right now what I’m doing is I have the
action for the homepage (which lists all offers) and a before_filter applied
to it, which redirects the user if no cookie is found. Is this the right way
though?

I would do it using the session rather than a cookie (though the same
thing underneath of course, but more railsey).

Colin

4

I think, we can also use http://geokit.rubyforge.org/api/geokit-rails/
(Geokit Plugin: Geocoder, Distance Finders, and more) to get visitor
ip, city and country.

5

On Monday, March 19, 2012 6:30:35 PM UTC+2, Colin L. wrote:

applied

to it, which redirects the user if no cookie is found. Is this the right
way
though?

I would do it using the session rather than a cookie (though the same
thing underneath of course, but more railsey).

Colin

I’m using the cookie rather than session since a user that will set his
city for the first time, is unlikely to “change a city”. So I suppose
that
the visitor will always be interested in his City’s offers (well at
least
until the cookie expires), that’s why I wanted to persist this
information.
That way, since I don’t have any authentication system, the site always
remembers the device’s location so the user doesn’t have to choose the
city
everytime he closes the browser.

What do you think about that?