Posted on Thursday, 18th September 2008 by David Edgeworth
Sometimes simplicity is all you need. There are many sites out there which allow you to upload your location by GPS and display it on your blog. But they all try to incorporate just about every feature under the sun to try and tempt users to sign up. I have been looking for a simple application to show my approximate location to my web visitors, but I don’t want anything all-singing, all dancing, and zoomable to my exact point at street level. I don’t want complete strangers knowing my exact location. I have also wanted something that will integrate with Fire Eagle. Today I found it.
Blogloc does just that - and at the moment, nothing else. You can tell it your location via the web site, your mobile phone if it has an integrated GPS receiver or a Bluetooth one, or via Fire Eagle. It displays a simple Google map as a static image, which can be used as a badge on your blog.
Let’s go into Blogloc in a little bit more detail. It is the spare-time project of an Austrian guy called Rainer. Looking at his web site, he has some plans to expand the project by introducing some social features, but at the moment all it does is allow you to display your location on the web. Nothing more.
Registering is dead simple. Give yourself a username, password and your e-mail address, and you’re up and running. Your default location is 0 degrees west, 0 degrees north, just off the coast of Africa. You can set your location on the web site, by clicking on the Google map and then clicking the ‘Update Location’ button. To help you along, there is a search feature. Typing in my postcode gave me an approximate location, but typing my village name got it spot on.
Alternatively, if you have a Fire Eagle account, you can authorize Blogloc to get your location from Fire Eagle, and use any other Fire Eagle enabled application to set your location. The speed at which Blogloc gets updated by Fire Eagle is surprisingly quick - in fact, pretty much immediate. The quickest I’ve ever seen; even Zkout and Ipoki take a couple of minutes.
If your mobile phone has a GPS receiver, or supports a Bluetooth one, you can also update your location using that. Blogloc has a mobile app that supports MIDP 2.0/JSR-179 compatible devices, so if you have one of those, the chances are it will work, but at present it has only been tested on a small number of Nokia devices. I have installed it on my Nokia N95 and it works perfectly with the internal GPS receiver. Again, simplicity is the key. You put your user name and password into the app, wait for a GPS signal, press the Sync button, and that’s it. You’re done.
So how do you display your location to the world? On the FAQ page of the Blogloc website, you are provided with a two-line piece of HTML code with a customizable width setting, which you can put virtually anywhere. I have placed mine on my profile at Spotjots, and right here. As you can see, it just displays a static image of my location that you can’t zoom into. Clicking on it will simply take you to the Blogloc website. The facility to show a dynamic Google map does exist, but that requires opt-in as an extra level of security.
It will even work to some extent on Facebook, but be warned, Facebook caches any image such as this, so as soon as it gets onto your profile, there it will stay, and it won’t update. It’s therefore not much use there unless you don’t do much traveling!
Is there any more to it? Nope. That’s it. Blogloc does exactly as it says on the tin, and it does it well. To be honest, I don’t think I need it to do any more.
Tags: Geo-tagging, GPS, Mobile
Posted in Mobile, Reviews, Technology, Website Review | Comments (0)
