I have downloaded and installed the necessary packages and it seems fairly straight forward, although as it's on a PC that's not that well suited to the workload I haven't yet requested an Upload password. Also if as chasu suggests it's not the real problem, then it won't make the slightest bit of difference. I had a look at osmarender last night - was rendering some experimental changes locally, this is probably the best way of achieving what I originally wanted, i.e. to make sure that changes render OK). However the bottleneck remains. If it's at the server there is probably little that I personally can do. Would require some software optimisations on the server, more expensive hardware, or a re-archtecture to allow the load to be shared among multiple servers.

This doesn't seem to work on firefox 3 beta 5 - the URL you get is:

http://tah.openstreetmap.org/Tiles/info.php?x=1976%201327%2012&y=&z=

i.e. it hasn't separated the numbers properly. Any suggestions?

One thing I've found is that there are a large number of hidden paths/footpaths/woodlands/lakes, some of which I've stumbled across while cycling/walking a route, others I've seen on the yahoo imagery. I think the thing that has worked well for me is to study the yahoo imagery and other maps of the area to look for likely interesting features before actually setting out, but not mapping them. You then have a good idea of what you might be looking for, and this has made things a lot more interesting for me. As well as finding the features you've seen you will also find other features you'd not spotted. You will find yourself doing lots of detours to figure out what that lump of the yahoo imagery really is for example.

When it comes to actually doing the map you then have the knowledge of exactly what there is in a particular location, and can do it all in one go, using the aerial imagery as a guide.

There will be a delay before changes appear on Mapnik, as they are only scheduled for rendering periodically - I understood this to be once per week but from my experience it seems to take anything up to 3 weeks before they appear.

Good to see more of the outlying towns/villages near Cambridge getting some attention. I've all but finished off Cottenham now and was thinking of tackling Soham in the next few weeks - which is in desperate need of some mapping. Out of interest, have you found an easy and practical way to record street names while cycling (which I presume is your normal method)?