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Santa coming to town? Here’s how to set up your community Santa tracker!

It’s that wonderful time of year! The streets are decorated with lights, everyone is just a bit jollier, and here at Glympse we get lots of emails asking about our Santa tracker for communities and local fire departments to use to share the location of their neighborhood Santas.

Here’s the secret – you can use our free consumer app and the public tags feature. Just give Santa a smartphone and have him share his location to the public tag. You can post the link to your website, Facebook, Twitter, or share via email. Anyone who clicks the link will be able to view your Santa’s location, with or without downloading the Glympse app.

Here is the step by step:

  1. Download the Glympse app.
  2. Once you create your account, click on the hamburger button (3 lines) in the top left corner of the app.
  3. Select “Add a tag”.
  4. Name the tag. For example, “capitolhillsanta”
  5. Your shareable link will be https://glympse.com/!capitolhillsanta and (or https://glympse.com/!yourtagname )

Want it password protected to keep others from sharing to the public tag? No problem

  1. When you create your tag, after the name of your tag, add curly brackets {yourpassword} directly after the name. For example: capitolhillsanta{glympse}
  2. Anyone who attempted to join the tag CapitolHillSanta would need to include the password in brackets in order to show up on the map.There are a couple of things to know about using this feature:
    1. The password is only enabled if you are the first person in the tag when adding the password portion to the tag name.
    2. Currently the password cannot be changed once it’s set, so be sure to keep track of the password to avoid headaches later.

For clarification, the tag name should be something unique which prevents you from accidentally re-using a tag that already exists. If this is not done, password protection will not work. So including the town name and year in the tag could help.

Now you’re set! Share the link far and wide, and get ready to see all of those sweet smiles as Santa travels through your community.