Freemap

IE problem should be sorted

September 3rd, 2008

The IE problem should be sorted now. Was something very trivial, shame IE’s debugging has to be such a pain!!! Also an advance warning - I’ve had spam problems with the blog lately. I’m planning on upgrading Wordpress but am very busy the next week or so, which means there’s the possibility the blog may have to go down temporarily if I get the spam problem again but don’t have time to upgrade.

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Sorry, Internet Explorer problems

August 28th, 2008

Apologies for this, but a few features, e.g. map annotation and clicking on POIs, are not working on Internet Explorer at the moment. Unfortunately the root cause is not clear, I’ll try and sort it out but in the meantime I recommend you use Firefox or Opera if you want to use those features, it works fine in both. The basic “slippy map” is working in IE, though.

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Please re-register for an account

August 14th, 2008

Made quite a few changes later (more lately) but anyway, the important thing for now is you need to re-register for an account if you have one already. This is due to some internal changes (a change to the database used) as well as improved guarding against spam.

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More than just a mash-up

July 8th, 2008

Quite a while since I’ve written anything here, but I’ve just been so busy! Much of that’s work stuff but have been very busy developing Freemap Mobile, the Java ME (MIDP 2.0) mobile client running on Nokia N95s and other phones with inbuilt GPS. That’s a whole post in itself so more on that later…

Meanwhile on Freemap itself there are a number of new things, all revolving around the philosophy that if you have the underlying OSM data to play with you can create sites that are more than just mash-ups. Now, when you add an annotation (hazard, path directions, interesting view, etc) to the map, Freemap tries to bind the annotation to the nearest OSM way. This opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. You could have self-describing walking routes: by people adding annotations to their local ways, then forming a route out of several ways, a documented walking route (made up of the ways and their associated annotations) could easily be created. The re-introduced feature of being able to add a description to the way itself (click on the way, then add a description on the left-hand side) also facilitates this.
The other thing you can now do with Freemap is upload photos (logged in users only) so people can get an idea of what a walk looks like before they set out. True, this is kind of replicating what Geograph does already, but again, the tight binding to OSM ways opens up interesting possibilities. You could (and indeed, this is already implemented to a point) view a “slide show” of a particular footpath or walk by viewing all the photos associated with a way in sequence. You can try this at

http://www.free-map;.org.uk/freemap/slideshow.php?id=23204160

Anyway that gives you a taster of the latest developments. Got to go now but there’ll be more on this at 4pm on Sunday at the SOTM conference, and expect a Freemap Mobile post soon….

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Sorry, maps temporarily unavailable today

June 20th, 2008

Sorry, unfortunately due to the latest planet.osm generation taking longer than normal, the automated process which updates Freemap weekly has failed which means no maps are available on the site today. Sorry about that, it should be up again by about 6pm UK time -I have no access to the server where I am at the moment.

On a brighter note, expect a post in the next couple of days about Freemap Mobile, the Freemap application for your GPS-enabled phone. A (very) early version of this has been available for a while but I haven’t got round to writing about it yet. How *do* people manage to keep blogs up to date as well as doing their job, developing software, socialising and getting out and about?

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Freemap and OSM tagging

April 27th, 2008

There’s now an OSM wiki page http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/UK_Countryside_mapping, which aims to try and sort out how to best tag UK rights of way and other countryside paths so that map renderers can differentiate both rights of way and path surface/condition. Well worth a read if you’re doing any countryside surveying!
Related to this, Freemap has now changed its rendering of highway=track and highway=service.
Anything tagged as highway=track or highway=service with appropriate permissions (foot=yes, horse=yes etc) will be shown as a footpath or bridleway superimposed on a track or service road. One of the major shortcomings of Ordnance Survey maps is they show tracks, but do not always indicate whether that track has public access or not. Freemap aims to show all tracks as dashed white lines, with footpath or bridleway symbols superimposed if there is public right of access.

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Area of coverage expanded again

April 27th, 2008

I’m happy to announce that the area of Freemap coverage has expanded again. As well as southern England, three other rectangular areas have been added, covering:

- the Oxford/Worcester/Cotswolds region
- Derbyshire/Staffordshire/Cheshire/north Wales,
- Lancashire/western Yorkshire/Cumbria.

The main thing that was choking Freemap before was the large cities, so have defined several separate rectangles which exclude the biggest cities of England. If performance remains OK I’ll also add some rectangles for rural areas of Scotland, south Wales and south-west England.

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Several improvements, including point-of-interest ‘wiki’

March 15th, 2008

Have made a number of improvements in the last couple
of days:

* Search now uses the native OSM PostGIS database, not geonames.
* Map key added!
* Simple point-of-interest ‘wiki’ (no revision history) - you can look up
nearby points of interest and access or edit simple ‘wiki’ pages on them.
These are linked to OSM nodes by ID (see dev post). This does not yet require
a login but may well do in the future.
* Seems to fully work on Internet Explorer (tested on IE 6, not on IE 7 yet)
* Some user interface and documentation improvements.

Sorry, still only southern England (rectangle with Bath and Brighton at opposite corners) but I’ll keep you posted of any changes here.

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Sorry, Freemap temporarily southern England only

March 1st, 2008

Bit of bad news unfortunately, as from today Freemap will temporarily only cover an area of Southern England bounded approximately by Westbury (Wilts), Lulworth Cove, Brighton and Reigate. The weekly planet import has become more and more prone to crashing, probably due to memory usage and my current server setup does not provide the required memory.

On the positive side though, I’ve received a possible offer of sponsorship via another member of the community (thanks Jonathan!) More when I know more.

Also watch out (when I get the time, busy adding direct OSM support to Mapnik at the moment!) for the possibility of a Freemap mobile application.
Anyway sorry for those of you not in the area covered, but hopefully this should only be a temporary situation. Any queries please contact me on nick@hogweed.org.

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Freemap back up

February 4th, 2008

Freemap’s now back up and updated using the latest planet.osm. Sorry for recent lack of service, this was due to having to change the scheduling of the database update to reflect the longer time to generate planet.osm compared to recently.

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Freemap

IE problem should be sorted

Sorry, Internet Explorer problems

Please re-register for an account

More than just a mash-up

Sorry, maps temporarily unavailable today

Freemap and OSM tagging

Area of coverage expanded again

Several improvements, including point-of-interest ‘wiki’

Sorry, Freemap temporarily southern England only

Freemap back up

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