#movesapp

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.

Keyring v1.5 & Social Importers v1.4

Yesterday, I released version 1.5 of Keyring, and version 1.4 of the Keyring Social Importers bundle for WordPress. This update moves the Social Importers away from using a postmeta value (keyring_service) and introduces a new taxonomy that keeps track of where posts were imported from. It’s optimized towards management within wp-admin, but you can also use it for front-end queries of your posts. The update for Keyring introduces a new service file for Moves, and fixes a bug in the OAuth2 base service.

The new taxonomy for the Importers is called keyring_services on the backend, and is labeled “Imported From” in the admin UI. It will auto-create itself based on all of the importers installed. You’ll see it within wp-admin under the Posts menu, and will be listed on the “All Posts” listing as well:

Screen Shot 2013-09-15 at 9.10.59 PM

Clicking the name of a service under the “Imported From” heading will filter the posts list by that service (e.g. Twitter). The main reason that the taxonomy is exposed through the admin UI is so that you can tweak the slugs if you’d like to. I noticed that on my install, I’d already used things like ‘twitter’ and ‘foursquare’ as tags, and so they had claimed the namespace for that slug. WordPress’ shared terms are annoying like that :). So, if you’d like to use the slugs of source services in URLs, you might want to rename them:

  1. Go to Posts → Tags
  2. Search for and rename the slug for each of the services (e.g ‘twitter’, ‘foursquare’, ‘flickr’). Name the slugs something like ‘twitter-3’
  3. Go to Posts → Imported From and rename the slugs for each service to the “clean” version (without a ‘-2’).
  4. Optionally go back to Posts → Tags and rename those tags again back to the -2 versions.

As part of this change, you’ll want to update any previous posts that you imported to using the new taxonomy. I’ve included a quick and dirty script to do this. It’s called migrate-keyring-postmeta-to-taxonomy.php and can be found in the root of the plugin. To use it, you need to move it to the root of your WordPress install, and then you can just access it through your browser. It’s likely that it’ll run out of memory or time out, but it’s written in a way that you can just run it over and over again until it finishes cleanly. On my server, once it was finished and produced no output, Chrome decided to display a “friendly” error message instead of anything useful. Once that’s done, your existing posts should all be converted over to using the new taxonomy, and there should be no more postmeta entries for keyring_service.

If you’re doing a clean import, I recommend doing it without auto-import enabled, and then once you’ve fully imported everything, enable auto-import and let it run from there.