Forum Moderators: phranque
I'll restate my original post:
CURRENT STATUS: I need (and have found) all the cities for the 50 U.S. states.
SEEKING TO FIND: Ideally, I'd like to find a resource on the internet that would help me classify each state according to their region within their state. I have not found a definitive resource on the internet for this.
==============
Here is what I am trying to do - lets say I have a portal about the state of California. I'm wanting to break things all the way down to the local city of, say, Santa Monica..... I'm trying to develop a site that has friendly SE pages. ANy thoughts on how to accomplish this?
So you might do your own definitions and assignments; if I were to do that I'd probably start by examining three-digit zip codes, which are geographically contiguous -- and easily available.
Orginal Post
------------------------
I have a database I made last year that has all the cities, regions, and countries of the world. For the US I have one that has all cities, zipcodes, counties, and states.
All the US information was gathered via the USPS. You can create a spider that sucks all the information down.
Another alternative I found is UPS. They have an XML data stream that you can use if you have a business account with them. I would recomment this approach.
Here is the table I use to store that data.
CREATE TABLE uszipcodes (
zipcode varchar(5) NOT NULL,
city varchar(60) NOT NULL,
statecode char(2) NOT NULL,
county varchar(60) NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (zipcode),
KEY city (city, statecode, county)
);
Bradley, I don't know what's on line, but with Calif. as an example the best resource I can think of (for someone who lives there) off line is to get the regional guidebooks from the Auto Club - AAA.
There are peculiarities for each region; people who live in and/or know the area get to know it. For example, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills and Burbank are all self contained incorporated cities with their own police dept., yet are surrounded on all sides by the City of Los Angeles. A tourist visiting LA will go to NBC Studios - not in LA but Burbank, though it's an LA tourist attraction. Universal Studios is Universal City - part of the City of L.A., not a separate city.
There are a load of what appear to be cities but are actually little sub-sections of the city. Woodland Hills is 91367 an 91364, Tarzana is 91316 - right next to each other. They are not cities though it appears so having a separate postal address, but are part of Los Angeles proper.
When people say New York City they generally think of what's Manhattan - which is only one of 5 boroughs. The others will be Brooklyn, NY, Bronx, NY etc., but are still NYC. Then Queens is broken down further - Flushing, Jamaica and so on - but they're part of the Borough of Queens, which is actually part of NYC.
I'd think the easiest way would be to start with maps of major metropolitan areas, maybe with the Chamber of Commerce. Look at the first few of Google's results for the San Diego Chamber of Commerce [google.com]. You'll see several neighboring or sub-cities named, as you would if you looked up city_name tourist attractions. Then, finding an online map would give a visual overview of the layout.
>I'm trying to develop a site that has friendly SE pages.
I might be inclined to stress the major city. People visiting LA might want to stay at a Marriott; they wouldn't know that the Warner Center Marriot is in Los Angeles, not knowing that Woodland Hills is part of LA. They'll be looking for Los Angeles hotel accommodations, they'd never find it unless it were included on a web site under Los Angeles Metropolitan area.
For a whole state this sounds like it'll need a lot of research, since each area has it's peculiarities.
With that said, I think I have found a resource on the internet that lists approximately 1200 cities in the state of California (a guesstimate).... Ayone have any good suggestions on how to easily categories all of these cities. I'm thinking that, off the homepage, there would be links for "A-F" "G-M" "N-P" and "Q-Z" Any thoughts about this? The power of this is that we are taking the world wide web and drilling straight to a specific city. The problem is maximizing our search engine marketing....
Thinking off the top of my head, maybe I could list the top 10 cities for the state, and also have a link for "All". That way, if people know where they are headed, then could go right to that city, but if they don't then they could go to the major metropolitan cities listed on the homepage........
Thanks everyone for your continued help.
The U.S. Census has an official list of metro areas online. Many stores are in cities not large enough to be metro areas, of course.
My search tool has 3 fields and users can put a search term in any one (State/Metro Area/City). A feature I could use would be a drop list.
This works pretty well. They usually try their city, or the largest nearby city first, then if that fails, the state.
Thanks,
Rick
If you are just looking for the cities etc why not go to www.dmoz.org ->regional->US->States->localities and copy the listings? Of course this is much more difficult then finding a database that has all of the cities in it ;)
