West or East Berlin

A mobile website that checks whether you're in the former East or in the former West Berlin.

Challenge

Some friends and I were having a barbecue at Tempelhofer Feld – a huge green area in Berlin – and I asked naively: hey, was this the former East or former West Berlin? One of my friends instantly claimed to know the answer - 'West, of course!'. But we had no way to check.

Solution

That's why I created west-or-east-berlin.com. It's a mobile website that shows you whether you're in the former west or east of the Berlin wall. In order to decide that, of course, you will have to allow access to your current location in your mobile browser.

My role

I implemented the site with Rails (to check the locale on server-side for better SEO). Getting the former wall coordinates was actually the toughest part. Then, using Javascript, I could draw the wall as polylines in Google Maps. Using the browser location, once you're close enough to the center of Berlin, I check whether you're inside the polygon, which means: West.