#geo

People & Places

https://beau.blog/2017/01/people-places/

Over the years, I’ve been working on a system to aggregate data that I publish to other social networks/sites back into my control, on my own WordPress install. Thus far, that has resulted in the creation of Keyring (plugin) to provide an abstracted interface to all of the web services I’m interested in, Keyring Social Importers (plugin) to do the basics of importing the data from different places, and Homeroom (theme) to display it all. Today, I’ve been working on a system that will detect people who are mentioned in an interaction, and link them across posts using a custom taxonomy. It does the same for physical locations, so I’ve called it People & Places.

Essentially, this plugin is just a pair of custom taxonomies, with some specific ways of referring to things. Pretty basic. It gets more interesting though when you update Keyring Social Importers to the trunk version, which will now work in tandem with People & Places to link everything up. I wouldn’t recommend it on a production site just yet — there’s a lot of rough edges still.

When KSI is pulling in content from each service (currently looking at Twitter, Instagram and Foursquare), there’s a new block of code that makes sure People & Places is available, and then looks for certain pieces of data. If it finds them, it bundles up the details, and passes that along in the import process. When posts are actually inserted, it will attempt to link up that post to the People/Places it found. If the People already exist, then they’ll just be linked, in the same way tags work. If they don’t exist yet, then a new Person entry will be created, and that will be used.

I plan to add in a basic term-merging function, so that you can manually (maybe automatically?) identify “duplicate people” across different networks, and intelligently merge their entires (re-linking any posts involved), so that you build up a single, combined view of your interactions with a particular person. I envisage some interesting possibilities with the archive pages for these taxonomies, and that over time it will build a really interesting dataset of your interactions, the places you physically go, etc.

I’ll probably still move the code around a bit, and there are definitely some bugs around duplicates and handling things across different networks, but it seems to be working so far. This is also probably the time to figure out a decent way to allow re-processing of imported data from the raw copy that the importers save in postmeta. Installing this new code will start gathering data on new imported entries, but won’t go back and do the same on all the posts you’ve already got. Rather than deleting all that data and re-importing/processing everything, I’d like to have a simple way to re-process the raw data that’s already stored locally.

Personal Location Tracking

I’ve been pretty fascinated with the idea of recording my own location for a while now. I started using Foursquare at SXSW in 2009 and have mostly continued to do so since then (I have over 3,700 check-ins). You can see my check-ins being syndicated back to this website (using Keyring Social Importers), and if you scroll back through the history of the main page, you’ll get maps aggregating a few check-ins at a time.

TripIt helps me keep track of all (most) of my travels, and provides back some data (via API), which I also import into this site. Here are all of my trips since March, 2008.

In February last year, I started using Moves, and quickly came to love its simplicity. It’s a background app that runs on your phone and keeps track of your location. Using server-side data processing, they crunch the raw location information to figure out when you were walking, running, riding, or on some form of transit, then give you back a timeline and a map showing what you’ve been up to. It’s a really nice “set and forget” way of keeping up with how many steps (roughly) you’re doing each day, plus your other forms of exercise. The app has continued to make small improvements, and then on April 24, Facebook bought them. I can’t say I’m stoked about the acquisition, but regardless, it’s a cool app, and it collects some fantastic data.

Since it’s all data, and there’s a growing sphere of location/movement-related data services out there, shuffling your data around is just a matter of a little programming. As I mentioned, I’m importing my Foursquare data into my blog already. I also have a Moves importer that’s currently creating a text-only summary of my information. I’ll probably add simple maps to it at some point. Moves-Export is a pretty neat service that will automatically import your Moves data and can give you a better breakdown of things, plus auto-post to Runkeeper and Foursquare (if you like) when activities are over certain thresholds (e.g. riding for more than 15 minutes). Pretty awesome.

Today, Chris Messina tipped me off to Move-o-scope, an awesome web app that will slurp in your Moves data, and give you back a rich visualization of it all. It lets you toggle things on and off, pan around the globe and see what you’ve been up to. It’s fascinating. Here are some places I’ve been since last February!

It’s fun to turn on the “Transit” layer (orange/brown, seen in the last picture above and the first one in the post), and follow the lines around the globe to see where you’ve been, then turn it off and zoom in to get a feel for what ground you covered while you were there.