Directions, Tents, and Geysers, Oh My!

Check out our first video montage, care of Kim at TBEX.

What is the TwitterFone?

If you’ve been keeping up with the road trip at all, you’ve undoubtably heard/read Pam, Kelly, and Peter referencing the TwitterFone.  I realized today, that nobody ever explained what that IS, for all you folks not actually along with them on the road.

When Kelly left, she took my Google G1 along with her, since it has crazy Internet powers: Twitter, web browsing, email, chat…all in the palm of your hands.  And when you’re on the road and want to let folks know what you’re doing, it’s an invaluable tool. I had no idea it was going to be such a popular little device on this trip, but I’m glad they’re having fun with my little baby, now dubbed the TwitterFone.  How I miss it so.

More About The Wonder Map

Now that the TBEX Road Trip crew has made it through their first full day of traveling, I figured it’d be a good time to write a little bit about the super cool trip map page that so many of you have been using to keep track of their progress.  

What is the map? 

Even if you’ve seen the map, you still may be wondering what it is, why it’s here, and why you ought to care?  First, what this map is, is a representation of everything these three bloggers do, see, and say.  You can track where the roadtrippers ARE, where they are going, see the photos they have taken, the blog posts they’ve written, and even their tweets - all on one convenient page.  You can even make suggestions!  How easy is that?  Very, I hope, because accessing that huge mass of information simply and easily is precisely why I made the map.  I couldn’t even imagine how many photos, posts, and other stuff three active bloggers would make…much less how you could keep track of them via their respective sites and services.  Checking 3 different Flickr accounts, Twitter, AND a blog didn’t sound like fun.  So I set out to make something do all that for me, and be fun to use.   

How do you know where they are?

Peter owns a neat little gadget called a SPOT (a satellite-talkin’, GPS tracking, position reporter) which can report where it is to its parent service (usually used by hikers.)  The folks who make the SPOT have a website where you can track your friends’ SPOTs no matter where they are in the world.  Luckily for us, I’m able to harvest this data and put it on the map.  So, wherever you see the little Routan is the last place that Peter’s SPOT reported.   

Technical Ramblings

I won’t go too much into the technical details (unless someone is really interested) but I’ll give everyone a sense of where I’m getting my data.  All of the photos are on Flickr (accessed with the handy, dandy phpFlickr library.)  Their tweets are available on the side thanks to the easy-to-use Twitter API CodeIgniter Library.  I’m using the Google Maps API along with the Local Search API to provide the suggestion data that my little “Suggest A Place” tool uses.  Almost everything else was done by hand in PHP, Javascript, CSS and HTML.  

Got any questions, suggestions, or even bugs? Let me know in the comments or contact me directly via email: austin (at) travellious (dot) com.