Following my experiment with importing Foursquare data, I’ve officially updated Micro.blog to support storing location information. The Micropub API now accepts checkin and location properties for sending venue name, URL, latitude, and longitude to Micro.blog. This works with the JSON format in OwnYourSwarm, which connects Foursquare/Swarm to your microblog.
Micro.blog on the web and the native apps do not send any location information. Right now this is purely an opt-in feature for third-party apps like OwnYourSwarm and custom solutions using the API. We consider location information very private and will never enable it automatically.
When a post has location information, you can see the coordinates in the posts list on your account:
The default Micro.blog themes do not currently do anything with this information. You can create a custom theme to access the coordinates as custom parameters, like this:
{{ if .Params.location_latitude }}
<img src="https://example-mapping-service.com/?center={{ .Params.location_latitude }},{{ .Params.location_longitude}}" />
{{ end }}
The 4 available parameters are location_name, location_url, location_latitude, and location_longitude. The venue name is automatically prepended to post content so that no theme changes are necessary. I’d like to explore offering maps as a built-in feature in the future. Enjoy!
