Friday, January 30, 2009

Facebook APRS integration

Today I released the Facebook aprs.fi map application. If you're on Facebook, you can use the application to show the position of your APRS tracker / vehicle on your profile page. Yes, you need to sign up on Facebook to get a glimpse of it. Sorry about that.

The map is somewhat configurable, supports several different map types, zooming, different measurement units and coordinate formats. It runs on the same quick and scalable backend servers with aprs.fi.

There are some issues with the combination of Google Static Maps and Facebook, so it might stop working once it becomes a bit more popular. We'll see later.

I'm sure a lot of you will shake your heads in disbelief, and quietly comment something about the uselessness of this feature, but let's face it, Facebook is a big thing, and I just wanted to try it out, see what's going on in there, and figure out how things can be integrated with it.

aprs.fi also has a facebook page now. I don't know what it's good for, but at least you can mark yourself as a fan of the site to show your support. And maybe exchange some related photos, links and videos there, or use the discussion board. I'm sure it has a better discussion board feature than this blog's comments.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Slovene / slovenščina translation completed

Thanks to S53TK, S55M, S56G and hihi, there's now an almost complete Slovene version of aprs.fi! Thank you!

Technical details: what's behind the scenes

Some of you might be interested in knowing what aprs.fi runs on top of, so here's some technical information about the technology, design and implementation of my little APRS site.