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The FluidDB People App from @paparent

NJR PERMALINK 31/12/2010 TAGS: FDB FLUIDDB FLUIDINFO PEOPLE

@paparent, author of the very useful FluidDB Explorer, has produced a simple app that shows the locations of FluidDB people on a Google Map. It’s inspired by the Djangopeople application, but so far has only the map.

If you’d like to add yourself (the more the better) you just need to add three tags into FluidDB—two to give your latitude and longitude, and one to tell @paparent’s app about you.

To do this all you need is a FluidDB account and some way of writing to FluidDB. It’s pretty easy using the command line from my fdb.py library, so I thought I’d quickly document how to do it.

The People application expects you to tag your user object in FluidDB with numeric tags in your namespace called people/latitude and people/longitude. So for me (njr), I had to do this:

fdb tag -a 'Object for the user named njr' people/latitude=55.8817504514
fdb tag -a 'Object for the user named njr' people/longitude=-3.10550451279

(You can see the tags on my object here, assuming you’re using a browser that isn’t Internet Explorer.)

The application collects users on the FluidDB objects with the about tag collection:peopleapp (UUID 62397fb0-6f96-404a-a8fa-ee3758cfa7f2) and looks for tags called peopleapp. So for me, that meant doing the following:

fdb tag -a 'collection:peopleapp' peopleapp

And that’s it.

Notes

A few things might not be clear, so I’ll explain them briefly.

  1. My library, fdb.py, automatically creates namespaces and tags as required, so there was no need to create the njr/people namespace or any of the tags: when you write to them, fdb.py assumes you’d like them to exist.
  2. I’ve left my username off the tags because fdb.py assumes that the tags you refer to are yours unless you stick a / at the start. So when I say people/latitide, fdb.py adds in njr/ at the start for me. If I want to refer to (say) paparent‘s latitude in fdb.py, I say /paparent/people/latitude. (This is slightly non-standard in FluidDB, but very convenient.)
  3. The final tag command doesn’t set a value: this is fine, as FluidDB doesn’t require tags to have values (or, more accurately, allows null values, which is what this command sets). @paparent‘s people app doesn’t require a value on the tag, so this is enough.
  4. In case it isn’t clear, the -a 'Object for the user named njr' is specifying the object to be tagged by its about tag. FluidDB creates an object for each user, and always gives it an about tag of this form.

So: go add yourself!

UPDATE

@paparent has added instructions for how to add yourself to the map using his FluidDB Explorer and Holger Durer (@HDurer) has written a blog post about how to use his emacs mode fluiddb.el to add yourself to the map without having to leave the comfort of emacs. How wonderful is that?

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