Aug 13 2008
About
About me:
I am Alan Cheslow and I put together this site for two purposes. First, so that I can share my family’s road trip vacation with the rest of our extended family and friends; and secondly so that we have a journal of our travels when we return. This site will be a way to capture and share our location, photos, videos, notes and thoughts as they happen. All of this happens almost entirely automatically, instantaneously, and for free.
About this site:
I’m calling this site a “travelstream” because it is like a “lifestream” that is specifically for a travel event. I built this site almost from scratch because I could not find an existing service that provided the type of capabilites that I was looking for. I’m planning on writing an in-depth description of the specific techniques I used to create this site, but for now I’ll just list the main tools and components that went into it:
- Wordpress / LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) - although I now work for Microsoft, I was brought up on open-source platforms and am most comfortable working with these tools. These platforms provide the base publishing foundation on which the rest of this website is built.
- Navizon - provides a Windows Mobile client application that runs on my Samsung Blackjack II smartphone and transmits my location over the Internet to their back-end service. My location is determined by GPS when available, and by cell ID triangulation when GPS is unavailable (for instance, when I’m inside a building). Navizon’s back-end service allows me (at my choosing) to expose my location via XML and KML interfaces.
- Dashwire - also provides a Windows Mobile client for my Blackjack II. This application syncs almost all of the data on my phone to Dashwire’s online service over the Internet. While this is interesting for several different scenarios, I am using the service to automatically upload photos and videos taken on my phone to Dashwire’s website. Dashwire then allows me (at my choosing) to share these photos and videos from their website and via RSS.
- Brightkite - provides a location-based social networking service. As a backup in case Navizon is not working I can provide my location information to Brightkite using SMS, email, or their mobile website. I can also use this site to provide short status updates similar to Twitter. Brightkite allows me (at my choosing) to share this information from their website and via RSS.
- Flickr - for storing higher-quality photos taken on our Canon PowerShot SD850. Flickr allows me (at my choosing) to share these photos form their website and via RSS.
- Yahoo Pipes - provides a toolset that allows me to combine, process, and reformat the data from all of the above services. The resulting output is then displayed as map data, image data, and as an RSS feed.
- FeedWordpress - this Wordpress plugin imports the RSS feed generated by Yahoo Pipes and creates new posts for each entry in the feed.
- ICS Calendar - this Wordpress plugin processes the ICS feed generated by my Windows Live Calendar of vacation events and displays the data as both a list of upcoming events and a month calendar.
[...] his vacation schedule, photos, blog posts, and several other GPS based activities. Alan has also provided details on many of the tools he used to build the site including several mobile client apps, Brightkite, [...]