As I was planning “All Nepal Trip” I thought lets plot, document and publish my trail to the public so that someone wanting to follow my trail will have the ease. I did a little research and failed to find exact solution as I wanted. Some popular trail tracking softwares like Geotracker or Strava are best for single day trip where the detailed path information is required and you don’t have to worry much about the battery or the network connection to sync them. But the trip I was planning was at least 150days and passes through some remote section where finding workable cellular connection will be lucky and similar finding reliable powersource to satisfy all of your electronic is not that easy either.
Due to all these I thought of coding one for the sole purpose of manually tracking spots and sync them when I got decent connection. All I needed was a mobile app to record the spot/check-in and a web app to display the collected check-in information on a nice little map.
I recalled the little skills I had on Android application development and php for web-app. I started coding it the very last moment of my trip preparation.
I have used the Open Source Mapping platform, OpenStreetMap for the map tiles and the Leaflet, a js library for the markers and the trail plotting.
As the whole user base is composed of me and a few of my close circles who wanted to know my whereabouts, those apps have no polished design and have large room for improvements both functionally and design wise. Anyway 2 nights before the kick-off, the testing succeeded and I declare my app as finished.
The working is simple,
- you click on create new checking,
- the location and date will auto-populate
- then you fill other information to describe the moment/location and you save it
- You sync them after you got a decent network connection
- which will be plotted on web app as markers and the markers will be connected by a straight line.
- Your relatives back home will know where you were last time.
One of the main motives of this app is to let the family know your last known location so that in-case of something happened, they can start the search party from there. Just like GPS beacon, tracker.
This is the backstory and when I was on a trip, I used to do 3-4 manual check-ins each day and used to sync them whenever I got a workable connection. Later I came to know there were few regular users of the web app to know my whereabouts. And at the end of the trip, I got a nice little trail marked over the map to denote my actual movement throughout the trip. Which I take as mission accomplished.
