oh and remember; we're 100% open source so you could always fork us and spin up your own Anchor if you desire!

github.com/dropanchorap...
github.com/dropanchorap...

If you're looking for a great alternative to Anchor there is always @beaconbits.app, it's the more social (and honestly better looking) brother of Anchor, I can heartily recommend it. I use it too. I've looked into an import script to BB but it would be quite involved so I have no plans to do that.

Your checkin records will keep existing on your PDS right where they are. And anyone is free to make a script or service that somehow re-purposes or re-uses them. So an export your data option is not really needed, it's already yours!

We had a good run, and it was a great way to figure some atproto things out. But I don't see a way forward that makes sense for Anchor as a viable product. Taking Anchor to the next level would require non-trivial investment which the usage does not support. So I'm closing it down end of this month.

Oh great thanks! Yeah I was too cheap to upgrade. Will save that for when more people start using it 😁

thanks! so far so good. running charmingly. but also not a lot of traffic so not really pushing the limits or anything 😅

Bluesky sign-in dialog showing a handle typeahead search for "tijs" with five matching account suggestions including tijs.org, tijssikma.bsky.social, tijshofmans.nl, tijsvandenbrink.bsky.social, and tijs010010.bsky.social, each with their profile avatar.

dropanchor.app now also uses the infamous typeahead component for auto completing your bsky handle in the oauth screen. I've extracted it from kipclip.com and made it into a little js module so it was easier to re-use, feel free to use for your own atproto projects tangled.org/tijs.org/act...

like @kipclip.com before it dropanchor.app has grown up a bit more and moved off valtown to @deno.land Deploy which should help it perform a bit better.

app.dropanchor.checkin ATProtocol lexicon schema by dropanchor.app

finally got around to publishing our checkin lexicon (and the like and comment one) lexicon.garden/lexicon/did:... it's been a while since I actually changed anything in it so seems ok to officially release this v1 of sorts.

Two cool projects I learned about this week, both building Foursquare-esque location based experiences on ATProto:

@beaconbits.app and @dropanchor.app

Love that people are working on geo-based apps built on atproto. Plenty of cool possibilities here, and a reminder of why all sorts of new apps should be building on atproto to have instant identity and social layers.

So cool! You don’t only own your data but you can bring it along to create new use cases in other apps.

We're not asking for 'all the permissions' anymore when you login.

screenshot of the new Anchor layout with a standard 3 column feed layout

I caved and got rid of the admittedly quite jarring pink background and redesigned the overall look to be more 'standard feed social'. Feels a bit more calm now at least if a bit less original 😉

.. and soon comment on it. This is a good reminder to explain all of this better though. So far I’ve used anchor more as a test bed for location on atproto so the UX is lacking in some obvious ways.

Yeah this is badly explained. Anchor, at this time, is a personal location logger. You log where you have been but there is no social graph, all check-ins have their own page which you can share anywhere though. Share button is at the bottom. When shared on Bsky people can see the checkin and like..

tijs.org/fsq2anchor Imports from your Foursquare data export into Anchor atproto records.

If you happen to have a Foursquare/Swarm checkout lying around somewhere you can now take those checkins and publish them on #atproto as Anchor checkin records. I made a little Golang cli app that should make it super easy (and takes rate limits into account) tangled.org/tijs.org/fsq...

In one of those 'you can just build it' moments @dropanchor.app now support @beaconbits.app checkins on your feed. All your beacons will be shown in your anchor feed (marked with the bb logo) and link back to the original checkin on beacon bits. Enjoy!

Noice! More mad folk making checkin apps on atproto 🫶

I’m very interested in how the locations sources are working for you, it’s quite different depending on where in the world you are I’m afraid

I (@tijs.org) am on a custom pds myself so I would stop making that mistake when making atproto apps 😛

Could you try again? I’m afraid we had some outages over the past few days..

Still seeing issues with check-ins failing once your session is expired. If you get a 500 error when checking in please logout and back in again for now. Sorry for the inconvenience. Will look into this after our holiday ☺️ bsky.app/profile/tijs...

New atproto app just dropped 🐔

Screenshot of the Anchor app showing the timeline feed of a user, with the new likes counts showing for some items

Screenshot of the Anchor app showing a detail checkin view with the new like count.

Build 25 adds the like count to the timeline and detail views in the app. A checkin you share can be liked by other logged in users on the checkins page on the web.

screenshot of the Anchor app showing the sharing screen after checking in.

Build 24 is now out! This fixes the share url to use the new checkin detail page url format.

Only on the web for now, mobile also coming soon...

Testing image uploads with the perfect location checkin image. Tijs Teulings 🦑 at Park 't Loo, Voorburg, Zuid-Holland, NL

Anchor might be for personal logging but that doesn't mean we can't be social on the checkins you share beyond your personal timeline. We now support likes ❤️ on the checkins! (comments coming soon)

dropanchor.app/checkins/tij...

Settings screen of the Anchor app with an option to choose the geo provider for the nearby and search options.

Build 22: Makes the settings screen options functional, but also introduces an option to choose your own location provider. Starting simple for now but eventually will likely do a bring your own api key setup. I believe the target audience for this is nerdy enough that I can get away with this 😛

Build 21 is now available in TestFlight! It brings beautiful photo checkins to the app making it useful for both travel logging as well as food logging, and probably many more use cases.

Also the timeline and detail views have been cleaned up and we brought the delete button to the iOS app as well