As detailed in a previous blog post “Adding a map to the blog” I generate a KML overlay out of a download from the Garmin portal. As I was watching this, the KML file grew very rapidly. Even at 10 minute interval data points, in 5 days the overlay grew to 2MB … And it is read by the Google Map API and processed for every display of the map.
There also isn’t a nice API to get the data, so I switched to using the data from the KVH satellite system, which provides me with location, latitude, longitude (and a minor bit more) at roughly 90-second intervals, updated 4 times a day or so. And I can get the data through an API.
Today I just did a manual update to check out the difference, and the track-only KML overlay came out to 137KB, with data from downtown Cape Town to current, in 90-second intervals!
So I put that up. But I lost the popups. This weekend I’ll write some code to automatically pull the data every hour and process only the changes, then next to put up hourly or so popups.
