The Technology of TransGlobal

By Jonathan Blake, Day -149 | January 29, 2009 |

Updating from the road can be an annoyingly inconvenient, taxing process. Assuming you find the time to actually sit down and go through with it, you must first find a location - somewhere with internet access, where this is possible. Once there, you may have the pleasure of navigating an unfriendly nest of USB cables (after you’ve managed to get them out of your backpack). You must then arduously work your way through various social networking and photo sites, uploading and updating, one by one, bit by literal bit - something that can be particularly trying on a dial-up internet connection.

The above is almost a worst case scenario, to be sure, but it does happen, and variations of this more are more frequent than you’d like to expect. Instead of working on your content, you end up spending 80% of your time doing the online equivalent of map reading and refueling. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if there are a better way to stay connected?

We believe that with some careful and intelligent preparation, it is possible to free up the vast majority of this otherwise usable time and energy (this appears to be a recurring theme of this site). The secret to connect travel is not to take more tech and more expensive gadgets, but to automate that which makes life tedious. The internet is a vast and expansive resource, and we live in the year 2009 - many of the technologies we commonly believe to be ‘in the future’ are already available to the public at large, providing that you’re willing to do the research. This is an exercise in lateral thinking, freestyle imagination, and devising methods to ‘glue’ components of the internet together into a metaphorical Frankenstein’s Monster, one which I dare say Mary Shelley herself would be proud of.

In the following paragraphs, I will elaborate upon the functionality and chronology of the monstrosity you see below, and hopefully provide some guidance so that you too may nurture a little Dr. Frankenstein within yourself. Now - go get yourself a cup of tea, coffee, or a stiff drink - you’ll need it.

The TransGlobal Tech Tree - How our software and hardware interact to keep us connected with minimal effort.

The tech-tree above demonstrates how we are able to update 5 individual social networking accounts (twitter [x3], facebook, flickr), and the main transglobal website (this one) using only one update from any part of the system.

Live photos from cellphones - photo distribution to flickr, twitter, and transglobal.me
The ability to capture and distribute photographs instantly (relatively - there is a delay of up to 10 minutes of delay to fully propagate through the network) is one of the most useful tools a traveller can have on their journey, as it provides almost-real-time updates to their followers throughout the world, without them having to slow down, or stop and find internet access. It can also be a useful safety net.

Photographs taken from our cellphones (basic phones with low (1-2) megapixel cameras and MMS capabilities - nothing fancy here) are sent to a dedicated flickr upload email address using email-over-MMS, where they are uploaded to the transglobal flickr account. The subject line becomes the title, and the email body becomes the description of the photo. It’s also possible to tag your photos in this method - we have chosen to have flickr automatically tag all of our mobile uploads with “mobile“, not only for ease of organisation, but also because it allows us to feed all of our photographs to Twittergram based on their tags. Twittergram is a one-page service that takes a flickr RSS feed, filters the stream by tag (you can specify this to be whatever you wish), compresses the flickr url using bit.ly, and then posts the link on the @transglobal twitter account. In the meantime, the TransGlobal website takes all of the photos tagged ‘mobile’ from the same RSS feed, and displays the latest 4 images in the LiveGlobal section of the site (on the frontpage).

Short updates from cellphones - string distribution to twitter, facebook, and transglobal.me
We’ve simplified this part of the diagram for the sake of comprehension.
The Short Version: we send short updates to the dedicated twitter service number based on our geographic location, which are then posted directly to the @transglobal twitter account.

What really happens: Our cellphones are tied to our personal twitter accounts. The RSS feeds of each of our personal accounts are fed into a yahoo pipes schema, which is designed to filter for anything beginning in ‘@transglobal‘. We then perform a search and replace (using regex) on each matching item (title) in the RSS feed to replace our usernames with ‘Jon:’ and ‘Edward:’, and remove the ‘@transglobal’ string. This system allows us to post to both our personal accounts, and optionally to @transglobal at the same time. For example:

From my cellphone, I send: “@transglobal we just arrived in egypt - it’s bloody hot!“, which comes through the twitter system as: “jonathanblake: @transglobal we just arrived in egypt - it’s bloody hot!”

This is filtered and rewritten to read on @transglobal: “Jon: we just arrived in egypt - it’s bloody hot!”

This is then output from yahoo pipes to a new RSS stream, which is in turn plugged into Twitterfeed. Twitterfeed is an RSS posting service, which takes the items from an RSS feed and literally just posts them to a twitter account (in this case, @transglobal) on a regularly scheduled interval (30 minutes, 1 hour, etc).

Anything posted to our personal twitter accounts is then parsed by facebook via the facebook twitter application, and is used to update our respective facebook status messages. Finally, the TransGlobal website lists the latest couple of messages from our personal twitter accounts. Once we leave, this will be switched over to a modified version of the official @transglobal account which will have the post updates stripped out (again, using yahoo pipes).

Adding photos to flickr
The last thing anyone wants to do when they hit an internet cafe or kiosk is to use the flickr website on a slow connection and a crippled IE5 or IE6 browser setup. For this reason, we’ve added executable copies of Phlogre, the Flickr photo organizer and uploader, to the memory cards of our cameras. Phlogre can then be run directly from the memory cards, allowing us to sort, tag, and upload our photos without ever using a browser. Although this doesn’t really have anything to do with the aforementioned system, I felt I’d mention it as it is extremely convenient and time saving.

The flickr RSS feed for our photostream is processed by the TransGlobal website, and then displayed in the photo block of the front page.

Updating the website, transglobal.me, twitter, facebook
I’ll skip over the actual process of writing for the site since that doesn’t really fit into the spectrum of this post (I’m sure Edward will make a post covering writing for the internet one day). Once the story has been published, it is immediately added to the transglobal.me RSS feed. This RSS feed is then parsed by Twitterfeed, which does its job admirably, making notification posts to the @transglobal twitter account (which I’m sure you’ve all seen by now). This is also washed down into a yahoo pipes schema (see what I did there?), which distinguishes between posts made by myself, and posts made by Edward. These new feeds are then tied back into Twitterfeed (not shown), where they are used to update our personal twitter feeds and consequently our facebook status messages.

Summary
Here’s the short version of the various processes (the non-automated parts are in italics, output sites are underlined):

And there it is - the technology that lets us do what we do. Hopefully this will give others some inspiration and guidance in their search for easier travel connectivity. If you made it this far, congratulate yourself by indulging in a personal vice - you’ve earnt it.

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