And again still mapping and not so much making entries in my diary, but nevertheless here is one:

Spanderswoud has nearly finished, but due to the thick tree canape during summer, my GPS tracks aren't much reliable there, so I save it for autumn/winter/spring.

I'm now concentrating on a whole new area for me: over the last few weeks I started working on completing a rather large regional cycle network in my neighbourhood, up to entering all the route relations in a network relation. The location with this entry is close to the middle of the cycle network. Here you'll see it on our map for route relations: http://openfietskaart.nl/?zoom=12&lat=52.25773&lon=5.11733&layers=0B000TTFFFTF

Also during the last few weeks/months I started using JOSM more and more and I'm now up to doing 95% of the mapping in JOSM. Yes, there's a steep learning curve and it's not meant for the faint hearted, but in the end you'll upload better database additions and it has a lot of features that are not found in Potlatch, especially when you're dealing with relations as much as I do right now.

I didn't write any diary entries in a long time, but did map a lot! I did all the footpath's of the parks in between 's-Graveland and Hilversum. Just check it out!

Right now I'm working on the park 'Spanderswoud'. Every week a new section of footpaths is being added. Along with any section of water I can find/see. It's been great fun to explore my own backyard, so to speak, finding tracks I never knew existed each time.

Today I traced the third part of park "Boekesteijn" and I'm now up to almost 100% done there! I have osmtracker perform 100% too. Including a visible trace on my HTC Touch Pro and updating tiles within a few hours.

I even found some paths there I didn't know even existed!

Yesterday I traced about 40% of the park "Bantam" and 20% of the park "Boekesteijn". Both are connected to "Schaep en Burgh".

Today I traced a second part of "Boekesteijn", which is now finished for also something like 40%.

I finished the Ankeveense Plassen top multipolygon for the fourth time and now it looks like it's going to stick in both render engines. In osmarender the whole thing is complete and in mapnik I'm waiting on the last few islands to show up next wednesday.

I now also moved some of my attention to the Naardermeer, a lake NNE of the Ankeveense Plassen. A lot of the lake's shores are in dire need of correcting and islands have to be created. You'll see now a nice difference between osmarender and mapnik which showes exactly what I've done so far.

Hi, I'm back after a while. Today I used my new HTC Touch Pro (Raphael) for tracing with OSMtracker and it worked fine, with it's own build in GPS radio. The tile loading works perfectly. I now see all the changes I made to the map, but I still don't get a trace from my walks.

Another thing you have to take into consideration, if you're planing on buying this device, is the poor performance of the display when the sun is out! The reflection of the hard glass-like display surface is huge! You constantly are looking at your own reflection; nice if you want to comb your hair, but terrible of you want do tracing, but the end results are satisfying I must say. It's nice to walk with such a relatively small device; especially if you come from a HP iPaq 4700 HX refridgerator.

I did Schaep en Burgh again and because now about 40% of the leaves have fallen down, I did get a much better trace, although not top nodge yet. I'd say I have a 60% accuracy now. I did get in some new paths though and could locate two bridges with enough credibility to their locations. In a couple of weeks I'm going in again.

I created a lot more detail in lakes/ponds and wood patches, added a lot of streams, added a hiking trail and an important cyclepath. A couple of buildings, both residential and industrial.

I also still struggle with one multipolygon. It's only one, the others are rendered fine in both osmarender and mapnik. I have no clue to what's the reason for this, but it clearly is faulty somewhere. Both engines have trouble with it. Maybe I just have to start over again sometime.

Overall I think it's starting to look very nice in and around Ankeveen. I remember somebody writing that in the Netherlands the features are very densly packed and Ankeveen is absolutely no exeption, but precisely that fact makes it nice to look at and to work on in my opinion.

I also now am stepping out more and more of the Ankeveen area and moved on to the neighbouring villages.

I tried for hours to get We-travel to work on my PDA (HP ipaq 4700hx with Wondows Mobile 2003), but apparently you'll need a java engine installed first, but that, so far, did not work out. I've tried several freeware JVM's, but I was not able yet to install the jar file. I'm hoping we-travel will work on my next smartphone (HTC Touch pro, which I don't have yet). Or does anyone know of a good site that wil tell me clearly how to go about this on my HP? I really want to try my changes out in navigator sofware.

Today I traced a 5.5 km cycleway alongside the main road of 's-Graveland. (Also close to Ankeveen). This road follows in places a distinctly different path from the main road next to it and not so long ago a part of it is newly created. It contains a lot of bridges.

I traced this with osm-tracker.

This afternoon I up and went to the 'Oppad', a nice hiking trail in the neighbouring village 'Kortenhoef'. I used Outdoor-gps, but might fall back on osm-tracker because with Outdoor-gps one doesn't seem to be able to input poi's.

The path is very muddy and wet after a lot of rain (which was the case today). isn't there a way of tagging that? I couldn't find it in the Dutch feature list. Maybe I'm going to post that question on the Dutch forum.

I just completed a test with outdoor-gps. It's on the wiki-page: osm.wiki/index.php/Making_Tracks_with_Homebrew-ware#Free_of_Charge

It performs beautifully with a VGA PDA (HP 4700HX), but what's even nicer: In the wiki it sais to replace "rtept" with "wpt" in gpx file, but that's no longer necessary! So if anyone is in the habit of updating the osm wiki-pages then by all means, change it!

The big multipolygon I made with lots of inner polygons is finally swallowed by Mapnik. I'm curious if OSMarender will display it, but I'm now waiting, I think, for three days now, to see my changes in OSMarender. They clearly have some problems there.

I read about a navigator on the web that uses our OSM data called: "OpenStreetMap routing service": http://tile.openstreetmap.nl/~lambertus/routing-world/ and with that I checked a bikepath I made and it works! That gives me the first real clue that I'm doing this right.

On another check the drawn path stops on a connection between two roads that where already drawn in there by AND. I changed a little thing and I have to wait for wednesday to see what effect that had in order to deduct the problem. At first glance the two roads look identical tagwise, but I created another attached road to the same node. Maybe I messed something up there. We'll see.

I also again added a bunch of wood patches, small ponds and streams.

Added the "Verlengde Bergse Pad", a track only for walking. With two bridges and one of them is also a cattle_grid. Two stiles, one at each end. You'll have to open a gravity closing gate there. (Gate posts are slanted so it closes on it's own)

I'm not to sure how I would appropiately tag this footway. I would say highway:footway and track:grade5 because that's what it is, really. Can the two exist together? For now I only gave it the highway:footway tag, untill I know better.

I created it with the aid of an OSM gpx trace.

A few hours before, I also added a lot of streams, small waterbodies and a lot of natural:wood patches. This is going to look so nice when it's all finished!

Also today I fiddled with the multipolygon (again). I found in the history that one half of it didn't have the multipolygon number and the other did. I seem to have done it right this time. We just have to wait and see how the mighty renderers swallow it.

I added some roads that where not on the map already and corrected others in and around Ankeveen. Tracked them first with OSMTracker on a 10km bike ride. That was fun!

People in the street where wondering a little what this guy was up to, riding up till every endpoint in the roads.

I had also a good view of streams there. I will go there some more with a piece of paper and draw in those streams as far as I can seen them.

Wednesday and so Mapnik did his thing once more. Finally I get to see what my multipolygon really looks like and if you're going to have a look you will see some errors. In some zoom levels a line is dividing the whole thing and in another you'll see a weird square, but... I think I solved it: I found that some segments of the outer closed way were doubled. I was able to locate and delete them without destroying the whole thing. Strangely enough it didn't work at first, it just got back after I switched briefly to the view tab and back (Yes, I deselected it first), but after I first removed all the tags and then went deleting the way's, it did stick.

By the way: in Kosmos it all looked fine, so also there's no 100% proof of what Mapnik is going to make of it in the end.

In Hilversum some road works finished a month or two ago, they added two roundabouts and changed the flow of traffic slightly in other points. I had my OSMTracker running whilst driving along those roundabouts yesterday evening and I'm planning on correcting them, but they're not of you're average run-of-the-mill type roundabouts. At some points they have 2 lanes, one for turning right and one for driving along for one quarter more. Of course some future navigation freeware has to be able to make heads or tails of it.

This map making thing is not as easy as you would think at first glance. Just the myriade of tags alone is dizzying. No wonder there is a constant debate about them going on. And so many people working on it all with their own idea's about how to do things in OSM. And of course everybody's right too. Only problem is, you'll at some point have to make a decision and that's tough, because most idea's will be cast aside and only one will survive and everybody want it to be his/hers of course.

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I made a trace in a park called 'Schaep en Burgh'. Well, that was not really a success! 10% accurate, 70% a total mess, and 20% somewhere in between...

Of course I'm walking under the trees and it was a total overcast during the trip. What made it slightly better was setting the option: "record only when accuracy is" from 10 meters to 4 meters. More tests with some better weather will follow. Maybe in the winter without the leaves, I will get a better reception and perhaps also another device would perform better. I'm planning on buying the HTC Touch Pro. It'll come bundled with the latest TomTom version somewhere in october.

Nevertheless, I did some road laying and more, because I know that place very well.

I created one multipolygon outer object en lots of small islands inside. I'm really anxious to see how that works out in the maps in a couple of days! There is still a lot more to do, but before I do that, I want to see the result so far.

An instant preview option would be nice in Potlach!

Okay, we have a swamp in Ankeveen with lots of water and inside the water a myriade of little islands. I found the possibility of multypolygons and I have to investigate that in more depth. Also the layer stuff I want to understand completely. This is important when doing work on such complex natural feature as our swamp or marsh, I think.

This swamp came into existence when in the old days people dug out peat for their fuel in stoves and such. They appearently did that in a not so orderly fashion, because, as said, it left a myriade of islands. On the up side, it's now a much appreciated peace of semi-wild nature, adored by the good people of Ankeveen. It's also a beautiful place to go skating in the winter. Well, not so much in the last few years, because the temperature drops not often and long enough below zero, to make it freeze over.

I already did a lot of way-correcting and already I changed the class of some islands from natural:water into natural:wood. I also created a body of water with layer 1 and gave the overlapping islands of wood layer 2. So hopefully the water will lay under the wood. Let's see what happens in the 2 rendering engines the coming days.

I found out that Osmarender and Mapnik render the layers differently. That's tough to work with, since osmarender is the first to show at least something but Mapnik seems to do a better job. Only for the Mapnik render I'm already waiting two days, for my first addition to show up in there.

I also downloaded and installed OSMTracker on my HP Ipaq HX4700 and it looks like it's working just fine. I'm definitely going to use that to map the footpath's in the parks we have in our next door town of 's-Graveland. So lot's of fun work to be done here!

I saw that inside a leisure:park object AND has drawn water bodies all wrong. The parts that are swampy woodland are drawn as water and the water itself is left blank (therefor has the tag leisure:park.)

Can it be that AND has these big mistakes in their maps? There is a lot of work to be done there then!

I'm on a roll! Solved question 3 to. As it turns out: you have to deselect the object you're working on when you change to view mode and back. It will save your changes the moment you deselect your object, I presume.