8r4d I’m logged in at the nearby Starbucks with a keyboard and a #coffee and thinking it’s probably one of those morning when I need to write a short post here to bookmark the efforts I made in the code for this very site over the weekend.

I’ve been working on this platform (8r4d-stagram) for nearly three years, though to suggest it has been a consecutive effort without breaks would be a total sham. I’ve been adding and tweaking in fits and bursts, adding new features or fixes as the ideas or the needs appear.

This past weekend I finally sat down to work on something I’ve been thinking about for years (casually) and a couple weeks (seriously). When I originally built this thing I was a couple weeks off of a trip to New York. It occurred to me at that point that, despite it not mattering all that much, my time stamps would all be two hours off. In other words, I would post something at lunch in New York and the human-readable time stamp might say “after breakfast” or something silly like that. Not a huge deal for New York, but knowing we were thinking of Europe six months down the road I realized that the eight hour time difference would mean I was posting breakfast pics “in the dark of night” or dinner pics “just before lunch.” None of this is a huge deal, of course, but it was a tiny little puzzle for me to solve. I ended up adding a little toggle on the upload screen where I could set the city when I uploaded a photo and it would offset the timestamp respectively.

All well, and good, but I forgot to use it half the time.

Fast forward to 2025 and we’re planning a trip to Japan. I had to add the toggle for Japan anyhow so I started poking around to see if I could simplify any part of the effort here: in other words, slightly automate it. There are all sorts of great services on the internet and I found one that let’s me read a timezone offset from an IP address. In other words, I added some code that behind the scenes says “hey, this phone is using ip address 123.123.123.123 or whatever, where in the world is that?” and the service replies “Oh, you’re in Edmonton and the timezone offset is -6”… which for me as a coder is a little variable that let’s me automatically set the location of a new post. So, if I’m in Tokyo on my phone, the post will know I’m posting from Tokyo and set the offset without me needed to change anything.

The more interesting thing was that the same service gives me all sorts of geographic information I can use, so since I’m asking it anyhow I just take some of that information, like the city and the coordinates, and I added a little bit of code on the back end to save that into the system in interesting places. Like, for example, if I’m posting from Tokyo, the location field will automatically say Tokyo and then will save that into the system for use next time. Or if I’m downtown Edmonton and it tells me it automatically sets the location to Edmonton, I can type in and change the location to Downtown YEG (or something) and next time I post at that location it will automatically fill in the location to Downtown YEG.

You the user don’t really see much except that I’ve been logging some of the geolocations in the extended post like so:

Geolocation near 53.461, -113.415.

…but for me, it saves a lot of typing and hopefully makes me some better posts. I’ve posted over 1200 entries on this little app, which is crazy, but it means I’ve got some serious investment in keeping it working and also in making it work better all the time.