Thinking About Location

Been brainstorming about getting better location data in my posts. Right now, there are two ways location data traditionally gets added to a post.

• Indigenous for Android can add Location from a phone, and my code does reverse geocoding to look up the location name and weather
• On the Browser, HTML5 geolocation is used to get the location.

But the problem is that HTML5 geolocation is often wrong, and for automatic posts, there is no way but IP address location, also often wrong, to get accurate data.

The easiest way to solve is for me to run a server to store my location and query it, but I’m not ready to do that. So, I wrote a quick hack to interface with my home automation system, which does geofencing on my location. But its not ideal.

So, I have two efforts I want to do:

1. I’m going to add a webhook so my site can receive updates from my phone and save them…so I can press a button on my phone and send the info while I’m writing, using a simple web query. I have an HTTP shortcut app for this.
2. Look into adding a dummy location provider that always returns something.

I wrote into my site the ability to query any API for the location. Anyone have one I can use?