OpenStreetMap
I've spent the past day or so working on my open rail map. I've built a little Gnewsense server which will re-render everything once a month, and it's currently rendering to zoom level 15 [which may be a little too high if I'm to increase coverage area].
osm.blogbound.com is my little borrowed server which does all the rendering, and http://ukrail.blogbound.com is now the home of the map. Thanks to blogbound for allowing me to use up lots of disk space and bandwidth...
Currently my main issue is that I have to do a complete re-render every time something changes. I can't see a way of only rendering changed tiles, even though I am sure there must be a way of doing so. Ordinarily I suppose it makes sense to render everything, but the rail network is now somewhat stable and therefore doesn't need constant re-rendering.
Discussion
Comment from Edward on 6 January 2009 at 21:29
Looks nice. Can you change it to include the River Thames?
Comment from kaerast on 7 January 2009 at 08:30
We've been discussing that elsewhere, and yes - that is what I am aiming to work on today. However, the importing of both waterways and railways into my postgis database is currently failing and so it may take longer than it should.
Comment from LivingWithDragons on 8 January 2009 at 20:44
Looks cool.
How have you made the grey areas (showing built up areas I think)?
Are all tunnels dotted red lines? This is confusing to know what type of railway line it is. For example underground/metro lines (not sure what they're tagged as) are orange, when they go underground it would make sense to be dotted orange.
A 'permalink' would be good on the map. So I can get a link of the area I'm currently zoomed in on. You can do it in Openlayers so it must be a case of just adding the right line of code.
Comment from kaerast on 9 January 2009 at 09:21
The grey areas come from Mapnik rendering, and I haven't actually looked into where the data for them comes from.
Mapnik seems to not render things exactly as I request sometimes, which is why I haven't got a key made. This is high on my priorities.
I had a go at adding a permalink function, and it seemed more complicated than it should be. The Openlayers permalink function is easily added, but you then need to get the php to use it when clicked on and that was conflicting with existing code. Again, it's high on my priorities.