I just wanted to let people know what’s going on with GpsTracker. It’s been a couple of years now since I’ve retired from software development. I spend most of time working on my guitar and I’m building a bathroom right now. I just updated the Android client to the latest software so I know that’s working properly. That is still the most popular client.

One thing I would like to mention is that Google is now requiring an API key to use Google Maps. So if things aren’t working, that’s a good place to look first.

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/get-api-key

I am still answering questions here on websmithing. Just create an account and ask on the appropriate page.

One last thing I’d like to say. I would like to update the GpsTracker iphone app. I no longer have an account with Apple and don’t want to spend the $100 that it requires. If you are an ios developer and would like to assist me in updating that, I would greatly appreciate it. If you would like to do the work for free, then I would include your name in the Change Log and you can use it as a reference for future employers. If you would prefer to be paid, I’m willing to pay $50 dollars but then I will just do the update without mentioning who the developer was. I think that sounds pretty fair.

Good luck in using GpsTracker and give me a yell if you need any help.

GpsTracker has now been downloaded over 2 million times on SourceForge. It’s also very popular on Github. I’ve been working on GpsTracker for about 10 years. I’m doing much less software work right now for several reasons. The first is I’ve been writing software for 20 years and I’m now 55 and writing software just isn’t as fun as it used to be and I’m no longer interested in dealing with all the stress.

So I decided it was time for a change. The first thing I did was to sell my house near Seattle, give away all my possessions (except for my stratocaster and tools) and move to France. I’m living in the mountains in a small chalet near Lac Leman where it is very quiet, very peaceful and very beautiful. Three things that I really need and want in my life right now. Also, I have decided to change careers. For the fifth time. So now I am writing my first book which is a work of fiction. I’ve been doing research for the past seven months in preparation for the book. This is definitely one of the riskier things I’ve done but life is too short to sit on the sidelines and in no way am I’m going to retire and watch the world go by. I don’t even know what “retirement” means to be honest. It’s just not in my DNA to sit around and look for amusing ways to fill my time until I die. People in my family tend to live a very long time, many close to 100. So as far as I’m concerned, I’ve just reached the halfway point in my life and I’m just getting warmed up.

Another reason why I’m winding down writing software and in particular, more software for GpsTracker is that it has not been as financially successful as I would have liked. I get approximately 200 to 300 dollars a month from Google Adsense which is nice. In the past 10 years, I’ve gotten about 400 dollars in donations. Nothing in GpsTracker is really that complicated (except for the WordPress plugin). When I first wrote GpsTracker, my goal was to write something that ran on several platforms as a learning tool for me. At first it was a simple PHP server running MySQL on the backend and a java ME client. This was before iPhone and Android came out. I, of course, added those clients as well as Windows Phone. And I wrote a complementary .NET server. Next I created a WordPress plugin which I consider to be the best piece of software I ever wrote.

The last piece of software I created for GpsTracker was a TK103 server and client. Have you ever seen those GPS trackers that you can just plug into the OBD (On Board Diagnostics) port in your car? Well, you can buy them on amazon and then you can pay some company about 20 to 50 dollars a month so that you can track your car. There are lots of companies that will do that for you. Well, I wanted to know how they did it so I ended up writing my own PHP socket server and client and integrating it with my WordPress plugin and there I was, tracking cars for free. I will admit that was a fun project. It was something I always wondered about.

I had a fellow developer, Brent Fraser, join me and he expanded the back end by creating SQLite and PostgreSQL databases for GpsTracker. The whole point of all this was to create a very flexible starting point for other developers so that they could take GpsTracker and work on the platforms that best suited their needs. I think we’ve done a very good job in achieving that goal.

I like helping people and I will continue to do so as time and desire permits. I’m going to create a forum here on websmithing to better organize questions and responses. At this point in time, I will not be taking on any new clients. I wish you luck and success with your software endeavors.

So anyway, that’s where I’m at and that’s where GpsTracker is at. Did I just end that sentence with a preposition? I really need to work on my writing skills…

The next version of Gps Tracker comes with a WordPress plugin and also an Android client. The plugin is available on the WordPress plugin website and you can install it directly from your WordPress install. The source code for the plugin is also now available in the Gps Tracker Github repo and Sourceforge download. The software is dual licensed. It uses MIT and GPLv2 licenses. The reason for the two licenses is because WordPress is GPLv2 licensed and recommends that their plugins be licensed that way also. The reason why I use MIT is because Gps Tracker has been licensed that way since the beginning and I wanted to maintain the same licensing for any new software added to Gps Tracker.

You can see the plugin working here on the websmithing website. This plugin took me about a year to write. I first had to learn how to create WordPress plugins and then how to fit Gps Tracker around their API and it was not easy. I’m using WordPress in a non-standard way. I have created a REST API that returns GeoJson. I am not using WP-API, which is WordPress’s up and coming REST API. The reason for this is because I needed a custom type (the GeoJson) and I did not want to litter the WordPress table that stores posts, users, comments etc with a custom location type. Gps Tracker generates and deletes lots of rows in a table. I wanted to have this table separate from the WordPress system tables. It just made more sense this way so I have created custom endpoints within the Gps Tracker plugin.

I searched long and hard on trying to find out how to create a REST API with WordPress. I found a couple of plugins that do that but they were to complicated for me to figure out and certainly seemed to complicated for my needs so I spent quite some time becoming one with WordPress plugin developer documentation… And one year later, voilà. I will post a tutorial on how I created the plugin because I think it will help a lot of people. Give it a test and please feel free to ask any questions about it on this post.

I’m happy to report that the latest version of GpsTracker now supports SQLite and PostgreSQL. This is all due to Brent Fraser, a fellow developer. One of Brent’s areas of expertise is working with databases and he has put quite a lot of work into porting GpsTracker over to these two databases.

Brent has also become the second developer on GpsTracker and we are going to be exploring some new technologies to enhance GpsTracker and make it more valuable to companies. What we want to look at next is using an off the shelf gps device like this that can be permanently installed in a car or truck. We are looking for something that is cheap and reliable and can be easily purchased off of amazon. This will allow small companies to track employees, trucks and other equipment without the unnecessary cost of a cell phone. Buying a SIM and mobile plan will still be required but not having to deal with phones will greatly enhance the usability of GpsTracker for companies.

Once again, I would like to thank Brent for his hard work and welcome him to GpsTracker.

When the phone clients send gps data to the website to be stored in the database, you’ll notice that all of the clients use the Http GET method instead of POST. Most experienced developers would look at that and immediately think it was a mistake and I am one of them. GET is used to get data such as getting a list or getting user data and POST is used to add a new item to a collection or in the case of Gps Tracker, adding a new row of gps data to the database.

But there’s one important difference between GET and POST that I am taking advantage of. GET requests are sent in the URL string while POST requests are sent as part of the Http message body. I get quite a lot of requests for help in setting up Gps Tracker and the easiest way to debug setup problems is to open up a browser and send data to their website by pasting a URL like this:

https://www.websmithing.com/gpstracker/UpdateLocation.aspx?longitude=-122.0214996&latitude=47.4758847&extrainfo=0&username=momo&distance=0.012262854&date=2014-09-16%2B17%253A49%253A57&direction=0&accuracy=65&phonenumber=867-5309&eventtype=android&sessionid=0a6dfd74-df4d-466e-b1b8-23234ef57512&speed=0&locationmethod=fused

If I were trying to debug Gps Tracker using POST, I would have to use a tool like curl or wget from the command line to send the data to the website. It’s a lot more work for me to ask people to use curl or wget instead of just pasting the URL into their browser and that’s the reason why Gps Tracker uses GET.

But generally speaking, you should be using POST when you are adding new rows to a database.

It took me six months of hard work to make the Gps Tracker plugin. I had to teach myself how to create wordpress plugins and that’s no easy task. I’m very excited about this because it’s the only gps tracking plugin on wordpress. Currently, I have it set up to track only one Android cell phone. My plan is to upsell a five and ten pack here on websmithing for $29 and $49 respectively.

My next task is to set up the easy digital downloads plugin and get stripe integration going so that I can do sales directly from my website.

If you want to check out the plugin, you can download it directly from WordPress.

And from your Android phone, you can download the client from Google Play.

I would like to ask any visitors and fellow developers to please help me test the new plugin. My main reason for building this plugin is that a lot of people were having difficulty installing the open source version of Gps Tracker and by creating a wordpress plugin, it takes away all that pain.

Also, wordpress now runs 22% of the world’s websites. That is a huge market and I have the only gps tracker on wordpress (did I already say that?). Anyway, I’m pleased to have this behind me, it was an immense amount of work to get to this point. Try it out and let me know how it works for you!

And what a whopper it is! This has been the second biggest change to Gps Tracker since it was first created. The design of the app has totally changed. It’s now using twitter bootstrap which has a style sheet that allows people to create responsive webpages. This means that it looks right on any size device such as a cell phone, tablet or desktop.

Not only that but Gps Tracker is now themed using bootswatch. This allows you to choose 17 different themes. You can switch themes by changing one single word. Here are 3 examples of the new theme, a light one:

a dark one:

and a cool blue one:

On the clients, I have switched back to using a GET request instead of a POST request. It’s just much easier for people to troubleshoot when they can paste a URL in the browser to test out the application.

Lastly, the actual functionality of the app has changed. When you first load the app, you will see all devices displayed. The one with the red marker is the most recent gps location. When you click on a marker or select a route from the dropdown box below the map, then you will be taken to that particular route and will be able to see the route’s history on the map. Clicking on a marker will allow you to see total distance traveled and speed.

Clicking on the Auto Refresh button will update the map once a minute automatically. That will work when viewing all the devices or when viewing a single route. To get back to viewing all the devices, tap on the View All button and you’ll be back to the main view. You can see that the two views have a parent-child relationship.

If you want to see the live test version of Gps Tracker, go here:

https://www.websmithing.com/gpstracker/displaymap.php

If you want to try it out on your android phone, download it from google play and then check it out on the display map above. I hope you enjoy the app, it’s a significant improvement over the past design.