Evan Sims

Evan is a 25 year old designer, programmer and college student from the cornfields of Illinois. Aside from being a freelance web developer, he is also an aspiring video game designer. Learn more.

Free for Job I am currently available for contract work! I have over a decade of experience in building appealing, standards-based web designs and applications. Check out my resume on LinkedIn, my list of ongoing projects and if you feel like we might be a good fit, drop me a line.

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Brightkite Location

The Brightkite Location plugin for WordPress pulls your latest location data and notes/photos and displays it on your blog. Simple and sweet. You can see it in action on my homepage, or on edwinvillanueva.com. (Let me know in the comments if you’re using the plugin so I can link to you!)

Latest release: v1.0 Beta 3a — Fixes incompatibility with Brightkite privacy settings, adds dynamic Google Maps option.

Download — Project Page on GitHub

How it works

The plugin can be called from anywhere in your Wordpress template, just insert the template tag. Once live, the plugin will fetch your latest data from Brightkite (including location, and the most recent note or photo you’ve shared) and cache it. The plugin will build a slick little static Google Map of your location, a text link to your location and the latest photo or note you’ve posted, if you’ve shared one at that location since checking in.

The plugin automatically refreshes your Brightkite data every 10 minutes.

What you’ll need

Installing the Plugin

  • Download and extract the plugin archive.
  • Upload the “brightkite-location” directory to your /wp-content/plugins.
  • Activate the plugin in your Wordpress dashboard.
  • Insert the template tag into one of your template files. See Readme.txt for the tag code.

Changelog

Version 1.0 Beta 3 — August 5, 2008

  • Fixes an issue with brightkite accounts with certain privacy settings applied.
  • Adds a dynamic Google Map option; pass “map_provider” as “dynamic” to enable. Still needs more work.
  • Hotfix A - Resolves a problem with some locations not being reported properly.

Version 1.0 Beta 2 — August 1, 2008

  • Removed dependency on SimpleXML; now uses the wonderful little xmlize library by Hans Anderson.

  • Added third settings argument to bkRenderLocation(), which allows for more customization over the output. Pass arguments in the form of an array, like so:

    bkRenderLocation('username', 'api key', array('map_width' => 100, 'map_height' => '200', 'map_zoom' => 14));

    The following setting options are available: map_width, map_height, map_style, map_zoom, map_beacon_color, map_beacon_size.

    map_width = Width of returned Google Map in pixels.
    map_height = Height of returned Google Map in pixels.
    map_style = Can be either ‘roadmap’ (default) or ‘mobile’. Mobile is usually better for smaller maps, but isn’t as pretty.
    map_zoom = Can be anywhere between 0 and 19. 14 is the default.
    map_beacon_color = Color of your indicated position on the map; can be black, brown, green, purple, yellow, blue, gray, orange, red or white.
    map_beacon_size = Size of the beacon indicating your position; can be tiny, mid or small.

Version 1.0 — July 31, 2008

  • First public release. Expect bugs.

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