GeoRSS Weblog

A couple of months ago, Yahoo! released the beta of their location brokering service, FireEagle. The service just recently came out of private beta and is now open to anyone to store and retrieve their current location.

One feature that was purposefully (so far) left out of FireEagle was getting a location history. Queries only return a unique XML markup of the user’s current location.

EagleFeed is a simple solution to this - it’s sole feature is providing a GeoRSS feed of your FireEagle location.

Since FireEagle allows a user to specify their location accuracy per application - you can choose to just provide a city or neighborhood level response to EagleFeed - making it a nice, variable granularity, location tracker.

Personally, I use it in my blog to provide a small badge on my location. Using SimplePie, a PHP RSS parser, I can easily pull in my location and do caching without having to deal with the complexities of OAuth for just a simple widget.

I’ve never really got into the whole Twittering thing, but I’m sure this will be of interest to some. I just came across GeoTwitter, which is an open source .NET code base that does what you think. Start here with the background details.

Midgard, a very full-featured CMS that is being used to replace Maemo.org has added a lot of functionality for supporting publishing & consuming GeoRSS.

Check out the Midgard’s Position module which uses a very nice PHP geographic position library. Midgard also uses RSSCreator with some geo modifications.

You can see an example of a GeoCMS built using Midgard by checking out the DeathMonkey motor cycle tour site.

The content management system Drupal now has the ability to consume and produce GeoRSS.

Dan Karran released a GeoRSS module that plugs into Drupal. He also developed a plugin that supports KML for use in GoogleEarth. These modules are part of a Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) demonstration system.

This project is very exciting as it is an excellent demonstration of large sites using Content Management Systems the benefits and ease of sharing and producing geospatial information.

Find out more about the plugin, and download it, from the Drupal site.

ROME is an open source (Apache license) set of Atom/RSS Java utilities that make it easy to work in Java with most syndication formats.

The GeoRSS module for rome currently supports points in GeoRSS Simple format, W3CGeo and GeoRSS GML format.