root/trunk/FireEagle/README.txt

# Fire Eagle Plugin for Movable Type
# Authors: Ben Trott, David Recordon, and Mark Paschal
# Copyright 2008 Six Apart, Ltd.
# License: Artistic, licensed under the same terms as Perl itself


OVERVIEW

The Fire Eagle plugin integrates with the Yahoo! location service, Fire Eagle
(http://fireeagle.com).  Fire Eagle is a simple web service which allows multiple applications
around the web and on the mobile to update a person's current location.  It then allows other
applications, such as Movable Type, to ask for a person's current location.  All of this is
done in a privacy protecting manner where the person grants, and can revoke, access to each
application.

This plugin adds the notion of "current location" to each author in your Movable Type install.
Each author must first authorize Movable Type to access their location via Fire Eagle.  Once
they've done this, you're able to output an author's location as text or a map square on your
published site.


PREREQUISITES

- Movable Type 4.0 or higher (4.1 for Action Streams integration)
- Scheduled task or cron job to execute the Periodic Tasks script (see below)


INSTALLATION

  1. Configure a cronjob (see below) for the script run-periodic-tasks.
  2. Unpack the Fire Eagle archive.
  3. Copy the contents of FireEagle/plugins into /path/to/mt/plugins/
  4. Copy the contents of FireEagle/mt-static into /path/to/mt/mt-static/
  5. Navigate to your profile, and click on "Configure Fire Eagle"
  6. Grant Movable Type access to your current location on Fire Eagle
  7. Configure a Google Maps API key for your Movable Type blog
     (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html), if you want to
     include a map of your location on your blog.
  8. Add the Current Location template tags to your templates.  (see below)


CRONJOB

Add the following lines to your crontab to execute the script at the hour and 30 minutes
past the hour:

  # Movable Type's scheduled tasks script:
  0,30 * * * * cd /path/to/mt; perl ./tools/run-periodic-tasks


TEMPLATE CODE

There are two template tags which can be used to expose an author's current location on your
published blog(s).
  - an author's current location as text
    <$MTAuthorCurrentLocation author="melody"$>

  - a map image url of the author's current location
    <$MTAuthorLocationMapURI author="melody" width="200" height="200"$>

An example widget that combines these tags for an author is:
  <div class="widget-fireeagle widget">
     <h3 class="widget-header">Fire Eagle</h3>
     <div class="widget-content">
       I'm at <b><$MTAuthorCurrentLocation author="melody"$></b>
       <br /><br />
       <img src='<$MTAuthorLocationMapURI author="melody" width="200" height="200"$>' width='200' height='200' />      
     </div>
  </div>


ACTION STREAMS

The Action Streams Plugin (http://plugins.movabletype.org/action-streams/) lets you
aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web as well as a list of your profiles
on various services. This Fire Eagle plugin will integration with your Action Stream if you
also have that plugin installed.  You don't have to do anything beyond install both plugins
to have actions automatically added to your author's streams whenever an author changes
location.

If you wish to take advantage of Fire Eagle in combination with the Action Streams plugin,
you should add the following CSS to your styles.css file:
    .service-fireeagle { background-image: url(<MT:StaticWebPath>plugins/FireEagle/images/fireeagle.png); }