It's getting rare in Germany these days that you find a pretty big forest area that nobody has touched before. I guess it will be the last such area for me in OSM.

So, the Zellwald near Nossen, Saxony, Germany is no virgin for you anymore, sorry guys :)

Die Mapping Party in Nossen am 29. 11. 2009 ist vorbei. Drei Bilder:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/images/f/f5/2009-11-29_Mapping_Party_Nossen_Mappers.jpg
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/images/b/b3/OSM_Nossen_before_2009-11-29.png
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/images/8/8c/OSM_Nossen_after_2009-11-29.png

Hat viel Spass gemacht, danke an die Mitmapper :)

Mapnik at zoom 6 and lower now displays country names (set on nodes in the database). Sometimes, especially in central Africa, these are positioned wrong though. Please help in moving these nodes to the right position.

I did São Tomé and Príncipe, Saint Helena, Tunisia and Egypt for now.

In addition to the Maxspeed style I posted earlier, Merkaartor now also has a style called "Lighting" that displays ways with the "lit=yes" tag in yellow, and "lit=no" in a dark grey. Once Merkaartor allows me to also select the canvas background color from a style definition, I'll switch to a dark background, giving something similar to a night mode.

If you don't run Merkaartor SVN, you can get the style from
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/editors/merkaartor/Styles/Lighting.mas and load it manually (Tools > Preferences | Style | (*) Custom).

After re-discovering the cool http://wince.dentro.info/koord/osm/KosmosMap.htm by StefanDausR, I created a style for the Merkaartor OSM editor:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Image:Merkaartor_Maxspeed_Style.png

If you don't run Merkaartor SVN, you can get the style from
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications/editors/merkaartor/Styles/Maxspeed.mas and load it manually (Tools > Preferences | Style | (*) Custom).

Ich habe gerade 227 Änderungen von Ortsnamen innerhalb der Bounding Box von Thüringen hochgeladen: Präfix "Thüringen" entfernt; "x bei y" zu "x" gemacht; "Kurort" entfernt. Die Präfixe "Vogtland" habe ich mal in Ruhe gelassen, da war ich mir nicht sicher, ob das nicht doch manchmal so offiziell heisst. Das Tag "openGeoDB:auto_update" habe ich natürlich jeweils auch angepasst.

It just took an update of the DejaVu font on tile to have the local Georgian names rendered (thanks jburgess):
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=41.539&lon=43.896&zoom=9&layers=B0FT

I was looking at the map sources on Wikipedia for მცხეთა/Mtskheta (http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?pagename=Mtskheta¶ms=41_51_N_44_43_E_type:city), and it seems OpenStreetMap is the only online map which shows Georgia in local script. Quite cool.

Since it is possible or even probable that Yahoo! is changing owners, I am now tracing stuff from their aerial photos that they allow us to derive maps from. Who knows what happens with that agreement in the future.

I concentrated on features that are hard to reach, like the banks of rivers (I traced the Neckar up to Remseck); or do not have a name, like tracks in vineyards.

Following a discussion with jburgess and artem on IRC, I started fixing up Leipzig's trams where a single way has two railway and highway tags (instead of two ways reusing the same nodes). Apart from maintaing these ways (i.e., does a maxspeed tag also apply to the tram? Probably not!), it was also causing rendering issues in Mapnik (see https://trac.mapnik.org/ticket/66).

I started with all the secondary roads, and it seems to have worked well (I kept an original OSM file of the area just in case). The ways with highway=secondary retain all the other tags which might be on there, while the ways with the railway=tram tag have just this and possibly a bridge tag.

The procedure was taking the OSM file and treat it with some Emacs keyboard macros and search and replace etc. (to assign negative ids to the new ways), and with JOSMs search feature.

If the renderers are happy, I will repeat the process with the other highway types in the next few days.

Comments welcome.

There hasn't been a lot of noise about this so it might have gone unnoticed, but thanks to steve8, the mapnik map has nice new changes.
Tunnels are now being rendered for railways and motorway, trunk and primary roads; tracks are not as prominent anymore in lower zooms as they used to; and some new landuse areas got color. Oh, and we have railway bridges! Since these changes are just a few days old, your area might not be fully re-rendered yet.

In osmarender, bobkare has implemented automatic icon placement for areas, which saves us putting in the extra node for the icon.

...because someone might report you to the police:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/19/chicago-police-ask-y.html

Ich habe angefangen, in Stuttgart alle Haltestellen der Stadtbahn nach railway=halt zu konvertieren. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/De:Mapping/Features/Eisenbahn ist da ziemlich eindeutig - die Stadtbahn ist eine light_rail. Die S-Bahn ist railway=rail und darf daher railway=station behalten.

Ausserdem haben es die Karlsruher auch so :)

When cleaning up a duplicated way of the Radel-Thon cycleway around Stuttgart, Germany, I managed to somehow delete a part of it - luckily the nodes still existed. (It involved a condition 412 and me manually editing the OSM file - don't ask.) I re-created it as good as I could, but there is a small part in Hedelfingen crossing the Neckar where it shares the nodes of a road - but I don't know which, since neither osmarender nor Mapnik show the route above the roads. Please redo if you know. Thanks.

Interesting link on Joel Spolky's blog - a website that calculates a score based on how many amenities you can walk to from a certain location:

http://www.walkscore.com/

I guess it would be rather easy to extend our Name finder with that functionality.

Since I started contributing to OSM a few weeks ago, I've been mapping in and around Stuttgart Zuffenhausen. Street drawing and tagging are mostly done (by using the Yahoo! photos), but naming is a bit behind, as is marking up oneway streets.

I also derive some pleasure from beating Google Maps in the details of the vineyard paths and the parks. :)

Next step is to get something like OSMTracker running on my PDA so that maxspeed zones etc. can be properly mapped. --Colin