We were recently contacted by Tufts University about our GPS tracking system. The Tufts student government had been working on a project to track their campus bus (The Joey) and chose Ublip because of our simple approach to GPS tracking. We’ve worked hard to include only the features that customers need within our web-based software. This seemed to resonate with Tufts and they enjoyed our simple and intuitive user interface.

As with most projects, there’s always a requirement or three that fall outside the scope of the current product. While we’d love to implement every feature our customers suggest, we believe in keeping our software bloat-free and adding features that we feel that everyone can benefit from. When Tufts asked for a few features that we considered “custom” we decided they could make use of our GeoRSS feed.

The main feature Tufts wanted was for their students to have access to “The Joey’s” current location without having to login to the Ublip system. While in most cases we strongly advise against this, it made perfect sense for Tufts. So giving them access to our GeoRSS feed allows them to supply HTTP basic auth credentials from their application to ours. Tufts engineering students were then able to consume our GeoRSS feed and create their Joey Tracker application with minimal effort. Check out the video below for a basic overview of the integration.