Most people who read this probably know by now I'm a bit of a mapping geek, I've been keeping track of my comings and goings since around 2000 using my trusty Magellan GPS 315. A few years back though I had a bit of a set back when years of tracks and waypoints covering 4 continents got lost when my Laptop got stolen and due to some unfortunate choice in application everything I had was useless since Fugawi requires a Dongle and won't give me a new one.
A lot has changed since and I've mostly moved my whole life online to various services like Flickr. It means that my desktop becomes totally portable since no data resides on it and backups can be centralized etc.
There is a gap in the GPS tracks world though a few online services exist like MotionBased.com but with heavy restrictions for free usage.
I'm busy writing a online application that will allow uploading of GPS tracks in the open GPX format for online storing, tracking, graphing and so forth. The idea is to allow for basic storage of tracks and waypoints for the hiker etc but also to cater to runners, cyclists etc who would like to track statistics over time using GPS units.
Key requirement is for the data to be available to blogs and other personal sites, you can store your data on the my system and it will allow you to display it on your own site if you choose, but only for tracks that you actually mark publicly available.
A quick demo of the data it provides, the below is pulled in directly from the database as it stands at the moment, the links to maps and graphs will work. The graphs especially requires some work still.
(If you do not see a table with information above this then please visit this entry directly via a browser, you'll need to have javascript enabled, it also seems some services like Bloglines strip out the javascript!?)
The above is from a walk that I took along the London South Bank on Saturday. The few data anomalies are due to bad GPS reception etc, I obviously did not walk on water, I'll look into ways to normalize the data at import time. This demonstrates though that any blogger can import the data using just one line of code into their own blogs :)
This looks really neat! I don't like motiontrack that much. It looks okay, but it's a bit expensive! Thanks for developing this - mac users are not really catered for with GPS. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your application :-)
Hi, R.I., sorry do not know your full name. I found the only way to contact you via this comments form.
Where did your idea of online gps tracking stop? Have you developed any site for it?
I'm asking cause I was thinking about such a tool for a couple of months since I bought a WinMobile handheld with GPS module. I searched in Google a bit and found your thoughts very similar to mine.
My name is Eugene, you can contact me via email that I put in the form. I want to ask you some questions but can not find your contact info all over this site.