Following on from the success of the “plot my posts and tweets” WordPress plugin, I though it would be great to roll out the functionality of plotting tweets on a map to a full site. The stripped down user interface aims to quickly engage with the user and get them straight into creating their trips.
Authentication
The site uses Twitter’s oAuth authentication technique for seamlessly logging people in with their Twitter account, which further streamlines the process of creating and saving trips.
Twitpics
One of the difficulties when trying to pull images through which uses have included in Tweets is that there are so many different services used. Some of the services allow direct access to the image file and some insist on going through their api to extract it. I’ve worked with Twitpic, yFrog and Instagram initially and plan to integrate further services depending on their popularity.
Geo-located Tweets
The feed that come though from Twitter includes the latitude and longitude of any Tweets that were published with the location service activated. However, lots of people don’t use this service because they don’t want their exact location to be publicised. Therefore there are a couple of other options I have developed to give users more control over which locations are attributed to their Tweets. By including the location in square brackets in the Tweet, tweetedtrips.com will determine the location using the Google Maps geocoding API. Alternatively any Tweets which weren’t geocoded will be listed when the user is creating their map and they can manually choose locations.
