Technical Ramblings

In my spare time (hah!) I’ve been hacking on an app on Ning, called PeopleFinder. The goal is to be a geolocation app, supporting a variety of things social. One of my many goals for a long time has been to create and use some kind of tool which allows me to generate MeNow data with no effort.

I’ve finally got it.

With the help of Geocoder, I can now type in an address, and have it automatically update my location on the website, including showing my position on a GMaps interface. The PeopleFinder API is still a bit weak, but using it, I can write a Client for Series 60 Python, which allows you to update via a GPS lat and long, or via an address.

I’ve created a token system for authentication via the API — when logged in, you simply hit the token link, grab the token, and put it into the client (in the “token” variable).

Eventually, once I write the functionality, it is my hope that I will be able to provide more features via this API — the ability to look for people nearby you, get their information, send them messages, and so on. However, right now this is just a 2-3 hour hack, and I’ve got piles of work to do – but this is so cool I had to share it.

As far as I know, this is the first example of a Ning App exporting a semi-usable API to remote clients. In part, this may be due to previous limitations on Ning’s end which have recently been resolved: looking at the phone client code, you’ll see the ?xn_auth=no parameter, which allows you to skip cookie authentication. It’s a pretty nice solution to the problem in my opinion — it solves what I need while not interfering with the rest of Ning.

So grab your phone, grab a client, and update your address on the go — then, the next time I see you in the neighborhood, I’ll drop by and give you a wave.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 10:23 am and is filed under Geolocation, Mobile Platform, Ning, Python, Symbian Python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.