Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Alaskapade Mapping Update

I was stoked.  I've been working feverishly behind the scenes on a mapping process for this site.  In that pursuit, I duct taped and super glued a bunch of unrelated applications together to get my Spot GPS satellite transponder to update this blog with a live map of my location as I ride the Alaskapade.  The idea is that when I'm gone and unable to get to the Internet to update the blog, readers can surf to this page and the map will be at the top of the screen.  I rode 650 miles in one day from the Dallas area down to Galveston and back and had the Spot device uplink my location every ten minutes.

It worked flawlessly. There was a Google map that you could zoom, pan, scroll, etc. Then, when I went to disable the location placement function on the geo server I use (because I don't always want to be tracked), it deleted all the plots from the 650 mile ride and there is no way to recover them.  It just left an empty map on my page, which I took it down because my error pissed me off.  I will ride some this weekend and reinstate a map, but at ten minute placement granularity, it won't be as representative as the one with 14 hours of location recording had.

I'm happy with the results, but pissed at myself for screwing up the ability to demonstrate it here.  At least I know how to prevent it from happening again and the good news is it will work as I hoped with no intervention on my part (after I kick it off) when I leave next month.