After a good deal of experimentation and testing various solutions I've come up with a good and reasonably reliable method to track my location (and hence progress) on the NYC to SF ride.
Visit here:-
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://tinyurl.com/lubmge&z=10
The piece of hardware that's making all this possible is a GPSSnitch. The GPSSnitch is a handy little device generally sold as a vehicle location snooping device for the sakes of detecting wandering spouses... or in the case of law enforcement squashing bad-guys liberties. OK great, but it also turns out to be ideal for my application where I want to keep regular updates as to my location.
With a little bit of behind-the-scenes-magic I've been able to draw out the device location into a more useful format, ie. KML.
Google Maps being the wonderful tool that it is can simply slurp in a publicly addressable KML file location and render it within Google Maps without any need to even think about the Maps API.
I'm planning a longish ride tomorrow morning so it will be interesting to see how the map develops through-out the day.
I'll likely get stuck into the Maps API before too long so I can embed the maps within the here-said blog and I still have the geo-tagged photo stuff to deal with yet, though it's clear there are all kinds of fun and games to be had with that stuff.
Enjoy.
N
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