{"id":1703,"date":"2011-05-08T14:27:52","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T14:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1703"},"modified":"2011-05-08T14:27:52","modified_gmt":"2011-05-08T14:27:52","slug":"your-google-latitude-history-as-a-heatmap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1703","title":{"rendered":"Your Google Latitude history as a heatmap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overview<\/strong> <\/p>\n

I made a web tool that draws a heatmap to show where you’ve been if you upload your history file from Google Latitude. <\/p>\n

What I made<\/strong> <\/p>\n

See a heatmap of where I’ve spent the most time at heatmapforlatitude.appspot.com<\/a>. <\/p>\n

If you like it, you can upload a Latitude history file and make a heatmap of your own. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I’ve done this sort of thing before…<\/strong> <\/p>\n

About a year ago<\/a>, I noticed that the new Google Latitude dashboard<\/a> had a way to export your history – it let you download a KML file containing locations that Google Latitude has captured you at. <\/p>\n

Any new source of data is always worth playing with, so I hacked together something to generate a heatmap to show where I spend most of my time. <\/p>\n

It was a Python script that generated a PNG picture of a heatmap, and a small KML file that said where to put the graphic when overlaying it on a map. <\/p>\n

Then I put the picture and the KML files on my public dropbox space, and used the (quite nifty) feature of Google Maps that if you put the URL of a KML file in the search box, it overlays the contents on the map. <\/p>\n

Hey presto, instant maps mash-up. <\/p>\n

It was quick-and-dirty and kinda kludgy, but more or less worked, and I got some pretty heatmap pictures<\/a> out of it. <\/p>\n

It needed some trial-and-error tuning – stuff like the radius of the heatmap blobs, and so on – which I put in a bunch of variables at the top of the script and put the script on my blog<\/a> in case anyone wanted to try it for themselves. <\/p>\n

What I did today<\/strong> <\/p>\n

On Friday, I was looking around for ways to do a heatmap for something at work when I came across some heatmaps by Björn Höhrmann<\/a>. <\/p>\n

He wrote a heatmap layer for OpenLayers<\/a> using the HTML5 canvas tag. <\/p>\n

Any excuse to play with HTML5 stuff is always good, and I already had code from last year to parse the Latitude history files. <\/p>\n

Doing it in JavaScript also meant it could be interactive. Instead of making stuff like the blob radius a script variable (run the script, upload the KML, look at it in Google Maps, tweak the script, run the script, etc…) I could use slider controls to play with the heatmap interactively.<\/p>\n

It looked neat, so today I modified my old script to work with Björn’s heatmap layer. <\/p>\n

The other problem with my old script was that people needed to know how to run a Python script to try it for themselves. While I was at it, I wrapped the Python in some Google App Engine code and put it online, so people could run the parsing code from the browser, too. <\/p>\n

Give it a try<\/strong> <\/p>\n

I’ve put it at heatmapforlatitude.appspot.com<\/a> so people can have a play. <\/p>\n

Even if you don’t use Latitude, I’ve put my history up there as a demo, so you can always just give that a try. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Overview I made a web tool that draws a heatmap to show where you’ve been if you upload your history file from Google Latitude. What I made See a heatmap of where I’ve spent the most time at heatmapforlatitude.appspot.com. If you like it, you can upload a Latitude history file and make a heatmap of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[231,388,492,387],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","tag-google-app-engine","tag-google-latitude","tag-heatmap","tag-latitude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}