Trackable blog for year out

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All_at_Sea

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We want to set up a blog for our intended cruise but want to able to have a track system where our position is marked on a chart/map for viewers. Does anyone have any suggestions for ease of use, accuracy, cost etc

Ideally as we sail we leave a snail trail across the chart.
 
Buy a Spot unit and just remember to turn tracking on every 24 hours. Spot allows you to share a trackable page across the web like this ( password tokolosh - can also set to open without a password). Spot works via sattellite not GPRS / SMS so you are never out of range, has its own sealed unit and has some poor mans EPIRB functions ( button press to call emergency services ) that could be be very usefull in an emergency and a function to 'check in' via email to say 'all ok' also by button press. These things have ( scuse the pun ) taken off in the soaring fraternity to enable crews to track outlanded pilots.

The alternative is to upload logged NMEA via a convertor to google maps and make a mashup on your blog.

goto blogspot , part of google, and likely to have integration between maps and the blog.
 
We use http://www.sailblogs.com/ which whilst I've not used it, has a facility to plot yourself onto google earth

The only drawback that I've found is that if you're posting a long blog/report (say beyond twenty-five minutes) it logs you out before you've finished writing it, though this could be just me doing something wrong, as I'm not very computer literate. I tend to draft my blogs on the onboard laptop, transfer them to a memory stick and then copy/paste from that in the internet cafe. Otherwise I find it easy to use and post photos too; most importantly it's also free.
 
You haven't said if you want to do this on board whilst at sea in real time or if you want to update it retrospectively when in an internet cafe or wifi hotspot.

If the latter I would suggest getting your head around Google maps as they are easy to use and the most widely supported. You can get plug-ins that allow you to just place the cursor in a any location, get the lon/lat (decimalised), draw tracks, import into google earth, put on your blog... and so on. Endless possibilities. For the record I went to someone's blog yesterday and tried using their fancy looking java-powered map and it was a real pain to use. At least google has it licked. Scroll down this page to see our current location. It's a new map so no tracks as yet but as we move around so we'll add tracks by creating KML files in Google Earth and uploading to this map. Sounds complicated but it's not, it's easy.

Go to Google maps and take a look at the hundreds of plug-ins for it.

Apologies if this information is not what you are looking for but it may help someone else searching the forums.
 
Agree with Demonboy... get your head around Google maps.... not only can you load up spot positions and tracks... but if you really want to you can start to do things like have markers for where you've been that click through to the appropriate blog pages etc etc etc...

Probably means getting a little techie... but quite fun once you've worked it out
 
Use my spot all the time. Lets the wife know where I am especially if there's a chance I might land in a field! ( doesn't mean she'll come and get me just that its probably not worth her keeping dinner warm /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif )

Use it on drives down to Greece so family can see where I am.

Will use it for sailing log too this summer.
 
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