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This was a cover of “I Love LA” by Starcrawler I did. I lived in LA for 17 years and really do love LA.

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It’s been almost 3 years since I’ve posted anything on this website. Gpstracker is still going strong. It just keeps on running without my intervention. And people are still downloading it, which is a good thing.

I retired from writing software 5 years ago and since then I’ve been practicing my guitar and learning music theory and I’ve written my first song! I sang the vocals and played guitar. I used logic pro for the drums and ezbass for the bass. The name of the song is “love, love, love”. Check it out and let me know what you think!



I’m still alive and so is GpsTracker

I just wanted to let people know what’s going on with GpsTracker. It’s been a couple of years now since I’ve retired from software development. I spend most of time working on my guitar and I’m building a bathroom right now. I just updated the Android client to the latest software so I know that’s […]

2 Million Downloads and Still Going Strong!

GpsTracker has now been downloaded over 2 million times on SourceForge. It’s also very popular on Github. I’ve been working on GpsTracker for about 10 years. I’m doing much less software work right now for several reasons. The first is I’ve been writing software for 20 years and I’m now 55 and writing software just isn’t as fun as it used to be and I’m no longer interested in dealing with all the stress.

So I decided it was time for a change. The first thing I did was

Version 5 of Gps Tracker out now with support for WordPress!

The next version of Gps Tracker comes with a WordPress plugin and also an Android client. The plugin is available on the WordPress plugin website and you can install it directly from your WordPress install. The source code for the plugin is also now available in the Gps Tracker Github repo and Sourceforge download. The […]

Why does Gps Tracker use GET instead of POST?

When the phone clients send gps data to the website to be stored in the database, you’ll notice that all of the clients use the Http GET method instead of POST. Most experienced developers would look at that and immediately think it was a mistake and I am one of them. GET is used to get data such as getting a list or getting user data and POST is used to add a new item to a collection or in the case of Gps Tracker, adding a new row of gps data to the database.

But there’s one important difference between GET and POST that I am taking advantage of.

Gps Tracker for WordPress plugin has been released!

It took me six months of hard work to make the Gps Tracker plugin. I had to teach myself how to create wordpress plugins and that’s no easy task. I’m very excited about this because it’s the only gps tracking plugin on wordpress. Currently, I have it set up to track only one Android cell phone. My plan is to upsell a five and ten pack here on websmithing for $29 and $49 respectively.

My next task is to set up the easy digital downloads plugin and get stripe integration going so that I can do sales directly from my website.

If you want to check out the plugin, you can download it directly from WordPress.

And from your Android phone, you can download the client from Google Play.

gps tracker for wordpress

I would like to ask any visitors and fellow developers to please help me test the new plugin. My main reason for building this plugin is that a lot of people were having difficulty installing the open source version of Gps Tracker and by creating a wordpress plugin, it takes away all that pain.

Also, wordpress now runs 22% of the world’s websites. That is a huge market and I have the only gps tracker on wordpress (did I already say that?). Anyway, I’m pleased to have this behind me, it was an immense amount of work to get to this point. Try it out and let me know how it works for you!

Version 4 of Gps Tracker has been released!

And what a whopper it is! This has been the second biggest change to Gps Tracker since it was first created. The design of the app has totally changed. It’s now using twitter bootstrap which has a style sheet that allows people to create responsive webpages. This means that it looks right on any size device such as a cell phone, tablet or desktop.

Not only that but Gps Tracker is now themed using bootswatch. This allows you to choose 17 different themes. You can switch themes by changing one single word. Here are 3 examples of the new theme, a light one:

Gps Tracker light theme

a dark one:

Gps Tracker dark theme

and a cool blue one:

Gps Tracker b;ue theme

On the clients, I have switched back to using a GET request instead of a POST request. It’s just much easier for people to troubleshoot when they can paste a URL in the browser to test out the application.

Lastly, the actual functionality of the app has changed. When you first load the app, you will see all devices displayed. The one with the red marker is the most recent gps location. When you click on a marker or select a route from the dropdown box below the map, then you will be taken to that particular route and will be able to see the route’s history on the map. Clicking on a marker will allow you to see total distance traveled and speed.

Clicking on the Auto Refresh button will update the map once a minute automatically. That will work whe viewing all the devices or when viewing a single route. To get back to viewing all the devices, tap on the View All button and you’ll be back to the main view. You can see that the two views have a parent-child relationship.

If you want to see the live test version of Gps Tracker, go here:

https://www.websmithing.com/gpstracker/displaymap.php

If you want to try it out on your android phone, download it from google play and then check it out on the display map above. I hope you enjoy the app, it’s a significant improvement over the past design.

Is your Gps Tracker crashing?

I’m in the process of getting ready for the next major update of Gps Tracker and one of the things I’ve decided to do was to move back to using GET instead of POST with the phones. It’s just much easier to troubleshoot using GET. But, since the app in Google Play now uses GET, any old installations will not work.

I am providing here an apk file that will work with your old installations. Here is how to install it.

  1. Delete the old app from the phone.
  2. Email this apk to the user.
  3. Go to Settings > Security and check “Unknown Sources”
  4. Open the apk attachment in the email

That will reinstall the old version of the program. Here is the apk file. You may need to right click on it to download it. If you have an problem downloading it, leave a comment here and I will email it to you. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Nick