Location on initial map load

[davenquinn]

On the initial load of the Macrostrat website, we set the location to a zoomed out "null island" view of the entire world. It might be nice to improve this, maybe in the following ways:

• Figure out the user's rough location based on their IP address and zoom to their nation or state
• Retain a locally stored "last visited" position for an individual user

When I load Google Maps, it starts ~near where I am located, which I think is broadly ideal.

Once the user has moved the map, we do maintain the ability to link to a specific location.

[davenquinn]

I think the canonical solution would be to use something like geoip-lite to find the nearest location. Having this running on the web server would have a bit of overhead but would allow us to quickly move to users' locations. There might be other, lower-footprint libraries that support lower precision linking.

[CannonLock]

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Geolocation_API

Could also request location directly.