{"id":103,"date":"2005-10-14T10:23:43","date_gmt":"2005-10-14T14:23:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/?p=103"},"modified":"2005-10-14T10:23:43","modified_gmt":"2005-10-14T14:23:43","slug":"peoplefinder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/archives\/103\/peoplefinder\/","title":{"rendered":"PeopleFinder"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my spare time (hah!) I’ve been hacking on an app on Ning, called PeopleFinder<\/a>. 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<\/a> data with no effort.<\/p>\n

I’ve finally got it.<\/p>\n

With the help of Geocoder<\/a>, 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<\/a> is still a bit weak, but using it, I can write a Client for Series 60 Python<\/a>, which allows you to update via a GPS lat and long, or via an address.<\/p>\n

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). <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,9,42,12,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geolocation","category-mobile-platform","category-ning","category-python","category-symbian-python"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}