Last week, in amongst a bit of a hosting problem, hill colouring went live on the cycle map. And it looks awesome!

Having something more pleasing than a flat grey background really helps put flesh on the skeleton of the contour lines, but it means that some stuff needs tweaking to fit. You can see the lovely new forest and wood styles on the image below - my very own forest pattern symbol, with a subtle green tinge and a solid border. The same area before can be found (here).

But wait - there’s more! In city centres, cycle routes can get quite complicated, and in some places have to go down one-way roads. You then end up with links that are only supposed to be followed in one direction - if you go the other way you might end up facing a no-entry sign (that you’re not really supposed to blithely ignore, politicians too for that matter). So you might end up with a confusing array of cycle routes, such as in central London:

… but no longer. The swiss-army-knife-like ‘relations’ to the rescue, which can give pointers as to which way you’re supposed to go. That gives us …

(Click the pictures for more detailed lovelyness!)

But wait, that’s not all. Maybe your area doesn’t have any signed cycle routes and no cycle paths either. Or maybe you’ve got both, and also want cycle lanes marked. A nice little bit of blue casing on either side of the road shows which streets have cycle lanes.

And finally, the icon wizardry of Matt Amos has helped me out with showing more useful points of interest - we now have drinking water locations shown (here in Trento, Italy):

… which are probably a better idea than going to a pub. But what’s better than going to a pub for a nice refreshing beer? Well a pub with free wifi, of course!

And there’s been a million and one places added to the cycle map too, but far, far too many for me to list here. Enjoy!

It appears that our hosts for the cyclemap, hostmonster.com, are playing silly buggers with it, and I don’t know why. I’ve no idea if or when it’ll be back again, but I’ll try to let everyone know.

Update: It’s back up now, and I’m resuming the update for this weeks tiles. Happy mapping!

It’s becoming more and more widely accepted within OpenStreetMap that what we call ‘routes’ are best described with relations, instead of tagging the ways. It means that we can have two routes sharing the same stretch of road without any conflicts over numbering and so on. It’s become well established in cycle-tagging, but I’m interested to see if it works elsewhere in different contexts.

During the first May bank-holiday weekend Dave and I scratched an itch that had been bothering me for a while. There are a few long distance paths through London, and the two that I’ve frequently come across are the Capital Ring and the London Loop, but we’d made no effort to join up the bits we had spotted. We set off to find the route of the Capital Ring from Wimbledon Common to Wimbledon Park, and accidently ended up following it all the way to Woolwich on the other side of the city.

So combining both the relations contexts and the Capital Ring expedition led me to try to render them, to see if it works. And it pretty much does. Dave had been tagging some bus routes during the development of Potlatch’s relations handling code so I rendered them too. And lo and behold, other people have been doing the same here and there.

London overview (click the picture, then the all sizes link to see it in full):

Around Earlsfield:

Bus routes around Wandsworth:

And the title of the post? Well, it’s not only that I was practising my (currently abysmal) cycling skills, it’s also what I say when I’m experimenting without having thought things through beforehand. No prizes for spotting which map I ripped off for the style sheets! Currently I don’t have any plans for making this a full service like the cycle map, which is still my main focus.

Time for another glimpse behind the scenes in the Cycle Map development!

Elevation colouring! Hill Shading! How cool is that? (N.B. If you ever hear me asking, then the answer is one of ‘very’ and ‘awesome’. ‘Meh’ is a valid response, but don’t let me hear you saying it!)

Now for all the OSM types there’s a few caveats. The last time I posted a teaser (for contours) it took me six months to get things working properly. And there’s plenty of things need fixing before the hillshading will go live, like some resolution issues, tiling issues, a minor problem involving the ocean shapefiles and so on - never mind choosing some colours that are a bit more subtle. So be patient!

Wow, it’s been really busy for the last few weeks. And as ever, the busier I am and the more fun I’m having, the less you get to hear about it here.

I’ve been to see some good music over the past few weeks - drum and bass with Nia in Camden, good old pub basement bands with Linnie and Jude, and an eclectic mix of choral stuff this time starring Nia. The latter two, plus a barbeque in deepest surburbia with Joth and Em and a whole Sunday of doing absolutely nothing rounded out a nice weekend. And I went climbing last week too, nice to find I can still climb 6bs without much practise.

The cycling has tailed off a little, apart from mammoth weekend rides with Dave. Mammoth in timespan if not in average speed that is - a fifty-two mile ride takes all day when the first 30 miles involve following footpaths around London even if the last 20 miles takes less than an hour to ride directly home! Still, we’re hopefully moving offices at work next week so I’ll be back commuting via bike instead of sauntering across Putney bridge in the mornings so that’ll get the fitness up in time to enjoy the summer weather.

Anyway, busy busy busy as ever. My thoughts on the new mayor and all that jazz can wait for some other time (or you can read Nia’s thoughts on the matter and pretend I wrote them!)

So perhaps you have used a web-interface to create new subfolders on an IMAP server. The problem is that thunderbird doesn’t show them, and no amount of clicking on things seems to solve the problem or show these subfolders.

The answer is to click on the account in question (i.e. one level up from your Inbox), then click “Manage Folder Subscriptions”. From there on it should be obvious - find the folders, and tick the boxes. Job done.