Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Scattered thoughts on social geolocation

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Screenshot of a map. There is a pop-up containing an image of me drinking a pint.

I want to be able to share my location with my friends on social media. Twitter (RIP) had a way to attach an optional location to a post. Facebook still lets me check in to venues. But neither ActivityPub (Mastodon) nor AT Protocol (BlueSky) allow me to do that. I've been banging on about this for a while so was delighted to be invited to chat with the GeoSocial Task Force on their monthly call. …

Using FourSquare's API to post location checkins to social media

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Two men are confused by a paper map

What is this, 2016? I like sharing my location with my pocket friends sometimes. If I'm in a cool bar that they know, perhaps they can recommend a drink. If they live nearby, maybe they want to come for dinner. Not everyone has FourSquare's SwarmApp, so it is handy to automatically share its updates with other people. Of course, Swarm doesn't cross-post to social media because walled-gardens…

Why is it so hard to passively stalk my friends' locations?

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Promotional photo for the TV series Friends.

I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were here, we could have had dinner together last night!" I do enjoy the serendipity of events like FOSDEM - randomly…

Rebuilding FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap

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Map of London with several bits highlighted.

I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spending the day at the park". So, is there a way to recreate that early Web 2.0 experience with open data and ActivityPub? Let's find out! This quest is…

Getting Images from a Foursquare Checkin

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Photo of a MacBook. The decal sticker is of Iron Man. His hand blaster is replaced with the Apple logo.

"Oi!" shouted Whatleydude, "Get Dabr to show images from foursquare checkins!" "Righty-ho sir!" I said. I started coding furiously. Of course, things are never quite as simple as I first thought.... So, how do we go from http://4sq.com/fgIWov to 1 Expand the URL Get your Bit.ly API Key. http://api.bitly.com/v3/expand ?shortUrl=http://4sq.com/fgIWov &login=YOUR_BIT_LY_USERNAME …