Thanks in advance.

Also, we’re super excited about iPhone 3.0 and push, a lot of potential for both fire eagle and the badge. Whee!

I haven’t been keeping up with the Fire Eagle badge ever since I got my iPhone. There’s no ZoneTag for the iPhone and the Fire Eagle iPhone apps that are available just aren’t a compelling use case for my daily interactions. They feel forced. But i’ve been getting a lot of interesting emails from people using the badge and I just checked my access log. There are tons of people using the Badge. Very exciting. Here’s a great user story that reflects exactly why I put the badge together in the first place:

> I just wanted to thank you for the Fire Eagle Badge and let you know that I
> have what I think is a pretty interesting use case. My parents are sailing
> from their normal berth in Annapolis, MD to Florida and then on to the
> Bahamas this winter. I have been maintaining a blog for them with a map
> showing their whereabouts – updated in real time with their GPS coordinates
> via a cellular data connection. When they go offshore they will not have a
> data connection so they purchased a SPOT satellite messenger-
> www.findmespot.com – primarily for safety, but also for tracking. SPOT
> offers a proprietary shared map page, but nothing I could put on their
> blog. They do integrate with Fire Eagle, however, so I linked them to a FE
> account and put your badge on their blog so they can be tracked offshore as
> well.
>
> Anyways, thanks again. I’ll probably be tweaking the layout of the map in
> the coming days. I’ll be sure to let you knmow if I find anything
> interesting while playing.
>
> Sam
>

Thanks Sam!

You can see the blog here.

Ok, ready? This is yet another undocumented feature. Grab your badge code and find the line that references fireeagle_badge.php. Here’s mine:

[snip]
src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=jqs24bfn1806dxzc&timezone=Eastern+Standard+Time"
[snip]

Next, grab your key, that’s the part after k=. Mine is jqs24bfn1806dxzc. Then, all you have to do is append that key to the URL below, like so:

http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge_feed.php?k=jqs24bfn1806dxzc

That’s it really. This new link you’ve created will give you an RSS feed of the last 100 times your location was requested. The number of times your location is requested will completely depend on the number of times your embedded badge is accessed. The badge only goes out and ask for your location when it is loaded.

You can take this RSS feed and plot out your road trip, everyday travels, whatever. A little cool and a little creepy, just the way I like it.

Enjoy!

lame++. Well now when I screw up you can pass a zoom level argument to the badge and hard code the zoom level you’d like. Find this line in your badge’s HTML:

src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=5h3z8nmt97qbdj&timezone=Greenwich+Mean+Time"

and change it to this:

src="http://www.txtst.com/fireeagle_badge/fireeagle_badge.php?k=5h3z8nmt97qbdj&timezone=Greenwich+Mean+Time&zoom=4"

Mess around until you find a numeric zoom level that works well with your map.

Enjoy!

To change your timezone, generate a new badge and use this dropdown:

Enjoy!

The FireEagle badge has been up for a week and I have users checking in from Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Moscow and Isle of Man. Oh also Iowa. Very cool.

I’ve been using ZoneTag to update my personal FireEagle location, which I figured out has a ‘continuous upload’ mode, so I don’t have to take an unnecessary picture to report my location. This has the unintended effect of making my badge perpetually current. This would be very eerie if I was updating my exact, instead of approximate location. I’d try updating exact location but the GPS kills my phone — plus it’s not so hot in the city.

On the accuracy end of things, my location badge is only as accurate as the service writing to FireEagle. In the case of ZoneTag, although I am Brooklyn Zonetag insists on putting me in “New York, NY”. Passing that information to Yahoo maps gives me a map of the Upper West Side. That still shows that I am in the five Burroughs area and not Iowa but I don’t like the misleading implication of the pinpoint map. One way around this may be to implement the “i’m in this general vicinity” map overlay box like on the FireEagle website.

Finally, i’ve always been interested in passively recording location so without any extra effort I can see all the places i’ve been the past year. I could do this with my badge except that it runs on a pull from the FireEagle API. It only requests my location if someone loads the page where the badge is embedded. So a log entry is inserted only when the badge is loaded. If I have changed my location ten times in the past day but my badge (embedded in my blog) has not been visited even once, those locations will be lost. To that end i’ve written a cron that periodically loads up my blog every once in a while so I don’t loose any locations. Now I can generate a dynamic places i’ve slept map.

After my unpleasant experience hacking up a WordPress plugin to display location within my blog, I decided to write my own Fire Eagle badge that isn’t associated with any particular service or CMS. Here is how it works: You authenticate against Fire Eagle, I give you a few lines of HTML, you insert the code anywhere you want. If you know what you are doing you can even hack it up. The map is optional. Four lines with the map, two without.

There’s no login on my end, I have no idea who you are. If you lose your badge, just make a new one.

Try it here. If it works for you (or doesn’t), let me know.

Update: I had to take the badge service down temporarily because of cross site scripting restrictions but I think those are resolved. If you’ve made a badge you’ll have to generate yourself a new one. Sorry about that. On the up side it takes a few seconds to do. thanks

Badge spotted in the wild:

I take a photo and my location is updated on my blog. This will really motivate me to take even more photos as I am getting a tangible added value from photo documentation.

This would be nice to have embedded in Facebook, as an iGoogle widget or possibly something much more lightweight that you could embed with javascript anywhere.

Also, unrelated — Jake at Local Projects has launched his City of Memory project, curated stories from the five boroughs. I had a small hand in this project a few years back, well worth checking out.