Tag Archives: google maps

How to display your accurate google latitude location address with the public badge map in your blog

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Google latitude is a great way to share your current GPS location with everyone. You can put up the google location badge on your blog and let the world know your exact geographical location.
But the latitude badge does not provide the exact address of your current location in terms of the area names but shows the exact location on the map. Google latitude badge shows only city level address along with the map. So I decided to write my own small PHP script to print out the exact address instead of an approximate one which is shown by default. You could use this code coupled with XMPP integration to show it as you google talk status message (a tutorial and script for this..sometime later)

Basically, instead of displaying “<City name>,<country>”,  this script will display “<Road name>, <areaname>,<cityname>,<country>”
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My Current Location

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Update as of 17 June 2011 : I have changed my phone from Nokia E71 to iPhone 4 and I found a better way to display my location. In Nokia Symbian Phones, the Google maps app itself included a feature to auto update in the background, but the battery drain was considerably high . Also , whenever I reboot my phone, I forget to enable tracking after bootup. Now in iPhone 4 in addition to the google latitude app, you could use Apple’s implementation of mobileme.com find my iphone tracking service right from iOS. I found this really cool script sometime back called playnice (PHP script run as a cronjob). This script will manually initiate a mobileme.com “find my iphone” request which will fetch my iphone’s current location instantly and use the data to update my google latitude location. This way, the battery drain is negligible because there is no background app running on my phone tracking my location, instead … my server initiates a location update request at a frequency which I specify and this request reaches my iPhone more or less consuming data as much as a PUSH notification only . This way I am always getting tracked even if I reboot my phone and there is no need of any app to be running in the background. Also there is no location history in mobileme.com, but with playnice, my server maintains a complete geo co-ordinates history in a text file, which will help me better track my phone , in case it gets lost.

My location data is automatically fetched using Google Latitude Location API. The Google maps app on my phone broadcasts my location automatically and thus you can see my current location on this page

The iframe displayed below uses google location API to fetch the address of my current location. You should head on to this post to read a tutorial on adding this to your own blog.



The mapme.at widget here shows all the locations I have visited in the last 1 week and can pull the data from both Google latitude and Foursquare servers. Pretty cool widget if you switch between foursquare and google latitude/maps on your phone very frequently.

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