Jan
11
2009

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Google Maps & Spot GPS

by Tyler

We received our Spot Satellite Messenger this week. I spent some time this weekend working with their sharing interface to set up a Google Map that will show our current/past locations on the home page of our website.

The XML parser I wrote for pulling data/caching data from third parties is working out really well. We are currently using it to pull a feed of recent photos from Flickr recent blog entries from Blogger and now recent locations from FindMeSpot.

For the more technically oriented:

If you purchase one of these units and would like to pull an XML feed of your recent locations this is how.

  1. Set up a shared page in your account management and set it to public.

  2. Open it and copy the 'glId' from the URL (see ours)

  3. Put your glId at the end of this url:
    http://share.findmespot.com/messageService/guestlinkservlet?glId=
    and voila you have a feed you can do whatever you want with.

Currently ours is set up to place a bunch of markers on a Google Map. This way we can have it display directly on our site rather than a third party.