I look after the website for a charity and they are planning a fundraising ‘jailbreak’ i.e. teams of people attempt to get as far away from the start point in 24 hours using only their own power, favours, hitchhiking, whatever.
As part of that, I’d like to add a live map to the site showing progress of the teams who will check in every 2 hours or so - probably via social media using an image, location and a hashtag.
So I need a map that can not only show the latest location for multiple teams but ideally their previous locations (almost like a breadcrumb) so people can see where they have been. This could result in a lot of points on a map. I’d prefer to avoid the whole Google API thing and whilst I’ve used inStacks Openstreetmap stack, that has a points limit. Map will need to scale automatically and be zoomable as whilst some people are just going to walk, I suspect someone will find a way to cadge a free flight and end up a long way away…
So unless there is a mapping stack I haven’t come across, I may have to embed some sort of mapping site into my site via an iframe. Has anyone got any suggestions as to a mapping site that might work (or stack).
In a perfect world, I’d like to add the team data to a simple document (e.g. Google Docs) so that anyone can update it and the map feeds from that but I suspect that will simply be too complex for a one-off exercise and I’ll just need to drink a lot of coffee for 24 hours
Thanks I do use Strava but that would require recreating the route every time a new data point came in. Also it isn’t possible to put multiple routes (i.e. different teams) on the same map.
You might be better off bringing in a social media feed (using a unique hashtag) and then doing up some nice map routes as a bit of a wrap-up/follow-up (“check out where each team went and how they got there” sort of thing). Unless you’re ok with being on stand-by for the duration and update things manually. Scott’s Points suggestion is good, but you may have scaling/zooming issues with that.
Another option could be something like one of the Counter/data stacks (Live Data from 1LD, for example) that can update from a google sheet. Then you could track km’s (or miles) from starting point. Actually, the new G Sheet stack could be really nice. You could (in theory, as I haven’t gotten up to speed on it), have a profile for each team (image, names, etc) and a column or two where they could provide their new location/status via a google spreadsheet.
Some good ideas there - will go and have a play and see what I can do. I’m fairly sure I’ll need some sort of ‘live’ map during the event so am resigned to a long night but perhaps I can simplify the effort using some of the data stacks along with Points (or others)
