Some of you have noticed that I’ve been doing some experimentation in recent months with geolocation. Geolocation is a very powerful aspect of the next generation web. Particularly in the mobile space.

Boulder, CO-based Brightkite stormed on the scene a few months back as a location based micro blogging network. Members could take photos from the cellphones, send short messages to be posted to the service, and follow their friends. Based on the concept of location, Brightkite users could “check in” to a location. I am currently checked in at “Woodlawn, Maryland”, a fairly generic location since I value my privacy in my home. However, people can check-in down to specific addresses, cafés, places of employment, etc.

Though my fascination with Brightkite as a mobile microcontent network has faded, their is one aspect to it that I find extremely valuable in the absence of GPS on my Blackberry and the lack of ownership of an iPhone 3G. That is their KML file.

I set about creating a plugin that would parse the KML file of the most recent Brightkite check in location. Thus, WP-Brightkite was born.

Notably, for those folks interested in the geotagging content, the Brightkite plugin will parse latitude and longitude of the most recent checkin and geotag feeds using the ICBM RSS namespace. For a little extra bling, I’ve provided a template tag which drops a little Google Map next to the subject line of posts with geotagging (see this post, for instance).

1. Upload the

   1	wp-brightkite/

   directory to

   1	/wp-content/plugins/

2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. Fill out Brightkite user data on your profile page. Note: Standard WP permissions apply.
4. Use the

   1

   within your template to print a mini 10×10 map icon, clickable for Google Maps location.

There’s quite a bit more I want to do with this, but since I’ve been using it here on Technosailor.com for a few months, I wanted to get it into the wild and fix any bugs (thus the beta tag) before exploring more functionality.

Let me know what you think, and consider a donation.

Update: Please log a ticket here if you are having difficulties. You must login with your WordPress Support Forums username and password (here) to get new ticket creation options. The comment system I have here does not seem to be sending people notices of followups on support requests.

When logging a ticket, please tell me what version of PHP you are using and what version of WordPress you are using. Thanks.