28 May
Written by harper on May 28 2008 at 14:51:39
After melding all these things together - i decided it would be neat to have the info on my homepage. So, i created this “mashup” to keep track of everything. It was my first foray into being a consumer of oauth (myself, programatically) and i really like it. I am for sure going to use this for the threadless API when it launches (thanks friends!). Dopplr’s API is a pain in the ass (there is about 1 page of API documentation), but i finally figured it out.
With all of the sites melded together - i was able to get my current location (fireeagle), and my future and past travels (dopplr). The info for both of these sites is provided in part by dopplr and tripit. Tripit feeding dopplr which feeds fireeagle. I feed tripit with emails. It has been hungry lately.
Seeing all this info together on my home page made me think of my friends page where he tracks exactly where he is at all times. its kinda freaky and pretty invasive. But i wanted to know if i could build it. And i figured that building the gps “puck” as Ilya calls it would be a good experience.
Since i have an iphone instead of a phone with true GPS, I used an app made by Erica Sadun (an awesome apple hacker) that queries the wifi APs and cell towers that the iphone uses to handle its pseudo GPS. With this app I am able to grab my location and post it to a script i made to track everything. From the script I am able to handle posting to fireeagle or twitter or whatever. A lot of the writeups of this sort of thing have the iphone handle the posting to fireeagle or twitter, however that doesn’t really make sense to me - since having less http calls on the actual device seems to be a better plan for battery dominance.
You can check out my current-ish location here.
Hi. My name is Harper. I am an engineer excited about real time, social software and the open source software movement. I am currently spending some time building interesting things and hacking for rackspace. In a previous life, I was the CTO of the awesome Threadless.
This is obviously my blog. I write about everything from being a professional yoyoer to hacking the newest Internet appliance. Be sure and check out my homepage at harperreed.org. If you are so interested, my resume is located here. I love getting emails and what not so feel free to contact me through here.
Be sure and take a gander at my photos.
If you want to contact me click here to start a chat.