Show your location on your blog or other websites

So we’ve been working on the history page to try to make it a good way to see where you’ve been and to share your location history with friends. There’s more improvements to come but you might be thinking “yes, the history page is good, but I want to be able to show my location history on my own website.” We’ve now got a couple of ways to let you do this. The first that we’ll talk about is a plugin for the Drupal content management system, the second is something you can use with any website.

Dan Karran has written an integration module for the Activity Stream module of Drupal. If you take a look at the blog post you should be able to get this module installed and tell people where you are.

The other method to share your location is with the new “Export” feature of our API. To use this you just need to add an iframe to your page linking through to the new page with a URL such as https://mapme.at/api/export.html?usernames=thebox. You can pass one or more usernames as you see fit (separated by commas), you can also pass arguments to specify the time and date that you want to show locations from, using similar arguments to the API ‘where’ method. Here’s a page showing history for “The Box” from the BBC over the past 3 months:

https://mapme.at/api/export.html?usernames=thebox&mode;=since&since;=3%20months%20ago

If you only pass usernames in then the page will show the current location of the user and as already mentioned you can also link to multiple users. Here’s the map showing the current location of the ferries on the River Mersey in Liverpool, GB:

https://mapme.at/api/export.html?usernames=royaldaffodil,royaliris,snowdrop

The export method uses the same security precautions as the rest of the site so if you want to use it to show your location to members of the public you may need to change your location sharing preferences, as always only expose as much information as you feel comfortable with. There’s more information about this on the documentation page for the export method so take a look there and then try it out!