Your Saillogger boat pages are unavailable to other boaters and public visitors until you turn sharing on. This page explains what happens when you do, what each page switch exposes, and how to share with chosen people without leaving your live position open to anyone with the link. A vessel may still appear through public AIS broadcasts independently of these settings.
Turn on sharing
- Open Settings, then the Sharing tab: https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing.
- Turn on the top row, Sharing. This is the master switch: "Master switch for public sharing links. If password protection is off, anyone with a link to an enabled page can view it without logging in."
- The tab reloads and fills out: your boat Name, a switch for each page you can share, and the access password rows underneath.
- Every page switch is now on, and each one shows the public address it has just published. Review the page switches straight away and turn off anything you do not intend to share.
Turning the master off again turns every page switch off with it. Turning it on publishes all page types initially; after that, you can switch individual page types off. Turning it off makes them all private again.
What each switch exposes
Under Pages You Can Share, each row is a separate public page, with its own switch and its own address.
| Switch | What a visitor sees |
|---|---|
| Live Tracking & Monitoring | Where the boat is now, and the instrument readings you monitor |
| Timelapse | The animated replay of your season |
| Stats | Distances, days out, ports and the rest of your numbers |
| Logbook List | The list of your trips |
| Individual Log Pages | A single trip page, for anyone who has a link to it |
Your journal has no switch of its own. It is published with Live Tracking & Monitoring: turn that on and your journal is public too, turn it off and both are private. That is worth knowing before you write anything personal in a note.
Your public address
The Name row builds your address out of two parts:
- a prefix: SV, MV, SY, MY or RV
- your boat name, at least 3 characters
Together they make addresses like these:
| Page | Address |
|---|---|
| Live tracking and monitoring | https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance |
| Journal | https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/journal |
| Stats | https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/stats |
| Logbook list | https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/logs |
| Timelapse | https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/timelapse |
Each row on the tab shows its own address once the switch is on, so you can copy the exact link rather than typing it.
A name shorter than 3 characters is refused, and the classic site does not tell you so: you type it, nothing happens, and the old name is still there when you reload. If a rename appears to do nothing, that is almost always why.
Share with a chosen few: the access password
Two rows under Access turn your public pages into pages only your people can open.
- Turn on Require Access Password.
- An Access Password field appears. Type a unique passphrase of 12 or more characters and leave the field so it saves. Do not reuse a password from another account.
What to know about it:
- It is not your account password. It is a separate word you hand out, and anyone who has it can view the public pages you enabled. Do not reuse the password you sign in with.
- A visitor is asked for it once. After that they stay unlocked in that browser for the rest of their session, so a family member is not typing it every time they check on you.
- Changing it locks out everyone who had the old one, including people already following you, until you send them the new one.
- Until a password has been saved, Require Access Password does not restrict the page. Set the password immediately, reload the settings to confirm it was saved, and test the link in a private browser window.
Private sharing, step by step
This is one way to make the boat visible to selected family and friends without opening the pages to everyone who obtains the link.
- Open https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing.
- Turn on Sharing.
- Turn off every page you do not want to publish. Remember that Live Tracking & Monitoring also publishes the journal.
- Set the Name row now, before you send anything: pick the prefix and the boat name you intend to keep.
- Turn on Require Access Password.
- Type a unique Access Password of 12 or more characters and tap or click somewhere else so it saves. Reload the tab and check it is still there.
- Copy the address shown on the Live Tracking & Monitoring row.
- Send the address and the password to your people, in the same message or in two, as you prefer.
The red warning under the live tracking address disappears when the requirement is switched on, but that alone does not confirm that a password was saved. Reload the tab, then test the link in a private browser window before sending it.
The Share buttons
You do not have to copy addresses by hand. There is a Share button on your monitoring page, your journal, your timelapse, an individual trip page, and on a fleet map. It hands the link to whatever your phone or computer shares with: messages, mail, or the clipboard.
If the page you are trying to share is not switched on under Sharing, the button does not send a dead link. It tells you "Sharing is turned off" and offers Go to Sharing settings instead.
Put your boat on your own website
If you keep a blog or a website, you can embed your live page in it. Paste this where you want the map, with your own address in place of the example:
<iframe src="https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance" width="100%" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>The frame shows the same public page as the link, so it only works while that page is switched on. If you require an access password, the password prompt also appears inside the embed; a direct link may be clearer for those readers.
Publish your weather to Windy
The Windy Station row, under Weather Sharing, publishes your boat's observations as a weather station on windy.com. It is useful in places where there is no other station for miles.
The switch stays disabled until three things are true:
- Saillogger has received at least one monitoring reading from your boat
- your Wind Direction Source is exactly
environment.wind.directionTrue - that latest reading includes an outdoor temperature
Publishing true wind direction needs plugin 2.3.0 or newer, so update the plugin first if the wind direction source will not take that value.
When all three are true the switch becomes usable, and once it is on the row shows your station's address on Windy.
If you are not a subscriber you can still contribute to Windy: there is a free Signal K plugin at https://github.com/saillogger/signalk-windy-plugin.
Changing your mind
- Turn one page private. Switch that row off. Its address stops working straight away.
- Turn everything private. Switch the master Sharing row off. Every page switch goes off with it.
- Keep sharing but change who can see it. Change the Access Password. Everyone with the old one is locked out until you send the new one.
- Respond to an unwanted follower. Individual blocking is not currently available. Turn off Live Tracking & Monitoring first if this is a privacy or safety concern, then set or change the access password before sharing it again with people you trust. Friends, fleets and messages has the full steps.
Turning sharing off does not delete anything. Your logbook, journal, statistics and timelapse are all still there for you, they are just no longer public.