Initially, I was using a program on my iPhone called Loopt.  Loopt is like Twitter with location.  That involved jumping through hoops, as Loopt’s RSS feed only shows the GPS position of the last post.  Not only would I have to post a message every time I got somewhere, I’d have to reverse geocode my position to grab the zip code to send to get the weather information.  I achieved this through JavaScript with the Google Maps API.  This worked until I found out about Fire Eagle.

All Fire Eagle does is log your location. Luckily, Fire Eagle has an API. Eagle Feed turns your location into a publicly accessible RSS feed. So, getting your location is as easy as parsing an RSS feed. By setting the read level of Eagle Feed to my zip code, the title of the single item in the RSS feed reports my city, state, and zip (e.g. Birmingham, AL 35223), and my GPS coordinates are also in the feed.

You can update Fire Eagle by manually by entering your location on the site. However, there are mobile applications, such as Active Eagle on the iPhone, that use the GPS functionality of your device to update Fire Eagle. In Active Eagle, I simply tap “Update Fire Eagle” to update my location, and my Eagle Feed.

Once you can get your feed there are plenty of cool things you can do.

I wrote a simple PHP script to open my feed (or pull it from a cached file), grab the human-readable location from the title and parse out the zip code and my GPS position.

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$out = file_get_contents($feed_url);
 
preg_match_all('/<title>(.*?)<\/title>/', $out, $loc_matches);
$human_loc = $loc_matches[1][1];
preg_match('/\d{5}/', $human_loc, $loc_matches);
$human_zip = $loc_matches[0];
 
preg_match('/<abbr class="latitude".*?>(.*?)<\/abbr>/', $out, $lat);
$loc_lat = $lat[1];
preg_match('/<abbr class="longitude".*?>(.*?)<\/abbr>/', $out, $long);
$loc_long = $long[1];

I then pass my zip code to Yahoo’s weather feeds to get weather data. I also pass my GPS position to Google Maps Static API to get a map of where I am.

Another idea would be to show Flickr photos in your area via the Flickr API. I’m sure there are tons of other things that would be fun or useful. Come up with some more ideas and make some cool stuff.