Problem: I want to easily pull locations or places I’ve been and write about them.
I used to have all my location data in Google Maps, I think they call it “Location History” or at least one of the previous iterations, it was. Originally it was Google Latitude. As part of attempting to de-googlify my life, I’ve moved my location data into Owntracks. It’s a self-hosted solution for storing location data and supports various apps.
Not surprisingly, being opensource owntracks has a pretty good API setup. But there wasn’t anything that could do anything with that data easily. Long story short, I built a WordPress plugin to handle it for me. I called it GeoPath.
Just enter a date if you want a single POI (point of interest) or if you want a path, enter a date range.
Examples:
Want a fancy map of the time you walked up a hill?
Just enter the date, it will pull the location and the weather
Queenstown Hill, New Zealand
3.5°C
Cloudy
What if you want to show the route you took?
Christchurch, New Zealand
12.1°C
Mainly Sunny
Anything else?
I don’t think this is super helpful for anyone but me, but posting it just incase it is.
There are a few bugs:
- Sometimes the temperature gets lost, just disappears
- When editing the block, the POI Marker gets rendered off the page
- The reverse location lookup comes back with terrible names so they have to be manually edited.
Overall it works quite well though.