Map Updates and explanation on login — 6. May 2011

Openmtbmap.org Membership explained

Okay, first of all explanations on the new system for posting comments and the required login.

As written last week, I could not / did not seem it fair, to continue to have an open comments form on openmtbmap.org and www.velomap.org.

 

As of Sunday, when you click on donations, you are taken to the membership options page, where you can donate money and after donating automatically get a link to the login page to create an account on openmtbmap.org. The system behind this is now working well and I haven't noticed any errors.

 

If you previously donated 10 to 19€, you may add up your donation to a minimum of 20€ and drop me a mail to manually enter your donation into the system, so I can send you a login. If you donated 20€ or more, drop me a mail and I'll send you a username/password. If you add up your previous donation to €50 or more, I'll give you a lifelong membership account. (for as long as I run this site). Please send your request from the same email, that you previously donated from, otherwise I cannot find/assign your donation (also good if you still know the date when you donated, but this is not so important)

 

The only thing is that currently I have not found a way to automatically add you as a user to both www.velomap.org and openmtbmap.org. So for now only people who donate 50€ or more upon request I will add to both sites, else please tell me which site. I'll set up some new sites on openmtbmap.org to ask questions/post comments on the velomaps soon.

 

Besides the comment sections being enabled, I plan to provide premium content (I think about creating a map of Europe (updated maybe every 2 month), where to get working address search files, you have the link only in the members section. Other people will have to create the address index files themselves or share it (CCBYSA 2.0 of course allows sharing this file, but on the standard download server I'll not include it). I'll also implement that non logged in users get a question to donate when downloading maps, while logged in users go directly to the download - because still only very few people ever donate (not even 1 out of 2000 people who download maps ever donate)

 

Map updates 6. May and working streetnames for edge 800 / Oregon / Dakota / gpsmaps 62

I spent a lot of time to find out what exactly could cause the Oregon (if no beta firmware installed) or the edge 800 to drop streetnames (or more correctly the labels of it on the devices). After having another idea, I got it solved by providing a lot of testmaps to User Ritzenflitzer on mtb-news.de forum.

The problem is related to the fact, that the devices stop showing any streetname labels, if one of the types 0x00 to 0x07 (and 0x0b) are set to invisible. This however not only to the map that is currently active, but to all maps on the GPS, and only showing up after a hard reset.

 

Therefore here is what you have to do if you are plagued with this problem. Only use openmtbmaps from this update onwards on your GPS and do a hardreset to get the maps shown with streetlabels. However watch out, there are plenty of other maps that can cause this problem. Most notably the Garmin Topo Deutschland 2010 as coming preinstalled on microSD memory card (the dvd version is fine though with default typfile). There are several other (mainly OSM based) maps that hide labels of theese types, so be careful, if you include any of them on your GPS, the streetnames will not be shown (sorry, cannot tell you which, just try it out yourself ).

 

Due to this I had to change around quite a lot in the layout, so old .typfiles are not compatible anymore (of course). I changed this of course on both VeloMap and Openmtbmap maps.

 

Contourlines as gmapsupp.img

Contourlines are now also available as gmapsupp.img for direct download 

 

Besides I did quite a few other changes:

Amongst the other changes are:

Add missing "$" one ele value in style, and add ele to many more things into the name.

Remove definitely private footway/path/track/service and remove separate sidewalks (for those entered by stupid idiots)

Change primary/secondary/tertiary_link to go to type 0x09 (ramp) in order to get proper driving instructions (shouldn't matter much however).

Analyse which road types are most common and change many types to save space and increase performance (this was saving about 3% of mapsize, before implmenting the changes to to the streetname bug - however still around 2% of mapsize reduction).

 

 

Overall, I think I spent more than 60 hours since last Friday on all of this. Damn, it really takes a lot of time to get this running. Well therefore I'll go biking this weekend in the Alps enjoying the nice wheather.

 

May 5th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Map Updates 29.4.2011 and changes to the homepage

Fist of all regarding the map updates.

No major changes this week. Changes include better naming of mountain passes (include altitude), and lil changes on altitude inclusion for summits/mountains. Foot/Walking routes with distance>12 are now rendered as hiking routes.

For next weeks update there will be a size reduction of 3-4% (well that also means a bit better performance) and maybe a solution to the streetname labels disappearing on Oregons / 62 series (without beta firmware) and edge 800 (there is no firmware that works yet).

The bigger changes are related to the server of the openmtbmaps. I switched from Apache to Nginx to improve the performance, and hopefully for the next year have no more downtimes. I also changed the caching mechanism. In a few days I will block comments on all pages and either open up a support forum, or some special pages to drop comments. However there will be a change. I'll only allow people to comment who have donated 20€ or more to openmtbmap.org.

There are several reasons for this. First is that I don't really want to spend lots of time to answer questions that have been answered on the pages already. Second: Typically the people who post them, never donate any money, nor are willing/able to read and comprehend. Second I don't want to leave comments/questions unanswered or cluttering up the page and thereby cause bad publicity. Third, I don't want to spend time on answering trivial questions, that are mostly related not to the maps, but principal usage/understanding of Garmin GPS/Mapsource. It simply takes a lot of time, that I would prefer to spend for other things.
 

I don't mind people asking questions, but online forums are the better option. They relieve me from answering, and they put out the word of the openmtbmaps existing.

 

Actually I find it sad that I have to take this measure, also because it will take me 2-3 working days to implement (setup Buddypress, S2Member, changing the comment form, entering addresses of people who did donate money into the system) and not sure how I will really implement it. But my decision regarding to this is taken, and I won't change my mind (only technical hurdens could delay it).

I think I may even try to get bonus content for people who donated something, but then that is something I actually don't want to do. The bonus stuff could be a 1monthly updated map of Europe, where only people having access to the member section, get the possibility to download the files needed for searching addresses and loading map to mapsource. (everyone else will have to do it manually, and creating the address index for a Europe map does need 6GB of RAM or more, so not available to everyone easily).

 

 

April 29th, 2011 | Leave a comment
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