What You’ll Need:

• Handheld device operating on the Android platform
• Flickr Account
• A site or blog using Wordpress
• XML Google Maps Plugin For Wordpress

Initial Setup Time – Approximately 15 minutes

Have you ever wanted to snap a photo, have it automatically geotagged and added to an embedded map on your site with one click?  If you’re anything like me, the thought of something this awesome is probably causing you to salivate.

A few days ago I was pondering how this could be done and within about 30 minutes of playing with my wife’s Droid Eris (yep, I’m still rocking an EnV 2) and cruising the plugins section over at Wordpress.org – I had found my answer. (a live example of this can be found on my custom photo maps page)

Step 1.

Open your camera application on your Droid.  Click “menu” and choose “settings”. Make sure the “Geo-tag photos” option is set to “on”.  Once you have enabled geotagging, snap a quick picture and save it.

Step 2.

Create a Flickr account (here).  If you already have an account with Flickr, log in.  Once you are logged into your active flickr account, open the drop down menu under “You” and choose “Your account”.

On the policy & permissions page, scroll down towards the bottom of the page and ensure that the “import EXIF location data” setting is set to “Yes” and make sure the “Who will be able to see your stuff on a map” is set to “Anyone”.

Step 3.

Once these settings are in place, it’s time head back to your camera, choose the image you just took, then choose the option to share.  Under these options, choose Flickr.  The first time you access Flickr from your Droid you will be required to authenticate your login (which is easy, it just takes a minute or 2) but every time in the future you want to upload there will be no login required.

Once you have uploaded your image, if you go back to Flickr you will see the image in your photostream.  The last thing we need to do with Flickr is to scroll down to the bottom of your photostream page, right mouse click over the link titled “KML” and choose “copy link location” (in Firefox – if you are using Internet Explorer, choose the “copy shortcut” option).  Once this is copied, paste it into a plank .txt document or somewhere that you can keep track of until it is needed.

Step 4.

Now that we have set everything up on the Flickr side, all that is left is installing the XML Google Maps plugin.  To install this plugin, go here to grab the plugin (or log into the WP Admin section of your site and upload it there if you want to save some time).  For questions regarding plugin installation, please checkout the Wordpress documentation regarding the topic here.

Once the plugin has been installed, head to plugin settings page and configure the display options as you prefer.  (Note, you will need a Google Maps API key for this plugin to work, you can get one here – Google Maps API Key.

Once you have configured your plugin settings the way you want them, head to the post or page you want your map in, enter this line of code :

Save your post / page and you’re all set!

Now, next time you snap a photo with your droid (as long as you don’t disable the geotagging option in your Droid) – simply choose the share by flickr option, click upload and you’re set!  Your existing custom map will be updated with your new image, in the exact location on the map that it was taken!

Not that pinging is an overly difficult task to begin with, but I came across a neat little trick that makes it very easy to ping any page you are viewing.

This is something that would work well for sending a quick ping after creating a link if you are building backlinks to your site.  Each you time you create a new link back to your site, quickly ping the page using this method to speed up the process of your newly placed link being spidered.

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Here’s How To Set It Up

1. Create a new bookmark in whatever Internet browser you are using.  Name it something like “Ping This”
2. Copy the following script and add it to the “location” box in the bookmark properties:

javascript:location.href='http://pingomatic.com/ping/?title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&blogurl='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&chk_weblogscom=on&chk_blogs=on&chk_technorati=on&chk_feedburner=on&chk_syndic8=on&chk_newsgator=on&chk_myyahoo=on&chk_pubsubcom=on&chk_blogdigger=on&chk_blogrolling=on&chk_blogstreet=on&chk_moreover=on&chk_weblogalot=on&chk_icerocket=on&chk_newsisfree=on&chk_topicexchange=on&chk_google=on&chk_tailrank=on&chk_bloglines=on&chk_aiderss=on&chk_skygrid=on&chk_audioweblogs=on&chk_rubhub=on&chk_geourl=on&chk_a2b=on&chk_blogshares=on'

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As you can see, this uses the Ping-O-Matic pinging service.  Whenever you want to ping the page you are on, simply go the the newly created bookmark and it will take care of the ping automatically.

Enjoy!

Bryan Eiesenberg shared a link on twitter this morning about a free firefox addon from WordTracker that allows you to easily do keyword research, and have the results readily available while creating blog posts, page content or articles.

I feel like an idiot for never having heard of the tool before as it’s quite a little beauty.

Check it out here:

http://labs.wordtracker.com/seo-blogger/