OSM Midlands pubmeet at the Briar Rose, Birmingham, Wednesday from 7pm-ish. See you there.

The chief recreation in Kidlington appears to be turning the NCN signs round. Which is fair enough, I guess - there's not much else to do in Kidlington. But it does mean that it's kinda hard to find your way through on NCN 51.

Sustrans should use more stickers, they're harder to turn round.

Anyway, we surveyed the western end of NCN 51 today: it was already on OSM as far as the edge of Kidlington (though using an older road route rather than the current, rather enjoyable cross-country path), so we continued from there into the terminus in Oxford, also taking the opportunity to cycle the new link from Tackley railway station. The rural bits were smashing, North Oxford was suitably posh, and about the only sub-par bit was the pavement path along the A4260.

And a preview option. No, I'm not volunteering to code either.

Godai2 - you can do formatting using standard HTML. Like this. (In fact, if you want your posting to show up properly on the RSS, it's best to put paragraph tags in, too.)

chilly - DavidJames is right. OSM trunk = UK primary A (green signs); OSM primary = UK non-primary A (black and white signs). Not immediately obvious, it's true, but then it's meant to be an international tagging system rather than just a UK one. The Highways Agency tend to call their roads "strategic" rather than "trunk" these days, anyway...

Three days in Suffolk (driving and walking) and one day cycling in the Fens.

Though many of the roads making up NCN 11 (Ely-King's Lynn) were already in OSM, the route wasn't tagged as such. So I've now done that - one more for the cycle map, and neatly dovetailing with David Earl's excellent work in Ely. Much of NCN 11 south of Ely appears to have been done already, subject to Sustrans not having finished it yet!

I did want to double back to March and get some more of NCN 1 done, but unfortunately the B&B lady's rather bizarre ideas on times of collecting keys meant I had to be back in Ely sooner rather than later, so I had to be content with continuing through King's Lynn for a short while. Another time, maybe.

As for Suffolk, though I suspect many of our travels were duplicating existing OSM work (well, it's hard to get away from the A12), there should be a good few more roads to add - plus the village of Blythburgh, where we were staying (tiny village, huge church). We kept seeing NCN 1 signs hither and thither (plus NCN 51 from time to time), but didn't systematically survey any of it. Sadly the one footpath I really wanted to survey wasn't particularly passable - something to do with high tide...

Incidentally, for any other OSMers with a fondness for the National Cycle Network, Sustrans' excellent Connect2 project has got through to the final round of the Living Landmarks competition for a £50m grant. The final decision will be made by TV phone vote - so tell your friends!

...more of the NCN today: Swinbrook to Asthall Leigh on Regional Route 47 (Oxfordshire). A very pleasant two miles, though, not least because the Swan in Swinbrook has Westons Organic Vintage behind the bar.

And it still makes me laugh that though OSM has become a massive world-dominating project with users from at least eight continents ("and remember - there are only seven!" [1]), I can still upload my GPS track and find it's three places in front of someone else's track captured about six miles from Charlbury.

If the weather holds, I'll get another chunk of the NCN next Saturday.

[1] sorry, obscure Monty Python reference

Put the date for next year's State of the Map conference in your diaries: July 12th-13th, 2008.

The location? Well, that's where you can help.

We have not yet settled on a location. It doesn't have to be in the UK again - but it could be. It doesn't have to be 'terra incognita' for OSM (not much mapping was done at Manchester) - but, again, it could be.

But here's what it does need to have:

• Enthusiastic local OSMers who can help organise it, and who have good contacts with potential venue. Manchester worked so well because there were people on the ground prepared to put the hours in.
  
• Good transport links. We want to encourage at least as good a turn-out as this year, hopefully better.
  
• A site equally suitable for learning, discussing and socialising.
  
• A technology-aware venue - obviously, we need projectors, Internet connectivity, etc.
  

Like everything else in OSM, this is a call for volunteers - but the OpenStreetMap Foundation will, of course, pay reasonable expenses involved in arranging the venue. If you're prepared to help OSM by putting the time in, you won't be out of pocket.

SOTM 2007 was a huge success. Let's make 2008 better still.

(Please feel free to circulate this to your national mailing list if you'd like to host SOTM in your country.)

Richard
on behalf of the OpenStreetMap Foundation

To accompany the move to the new API, there's also a new Potlatch (version 0.4). Of course, Potlatch has always been based around segment-free editing, so this has been a fairly happy transition. But there are plenty of changes, and here are the main ones:

• Works with the new database!
  
• You can now merge two adjacent ways (i.e. ones which share an end-point) by clicking one, then shift-clicking the other.
  
• You can reverse the order of a way by clicking the arrow icon.
  
• When drawing a way (i.e. elastic band), pressing Delete will act as "backspace" - i.e. remove the point you added last.
  
• The age-old problem of : in keys has been kludged, for now. They appear as | (bar), and you can edit them as long as you too type | instead of :.
  
• Lots and lots of bugfixes, efficiency improvements, etc.
  

Potlatch doesn't yet let you create relations. However, it's fairly well behaved in that, if you delete a way or node, Potlatch will remove it from any relations of which it's a member. As usual, if (when) you find bugs, either e-mail details to me, or use trac, or edit Potlatch/Bugs on the wiki.

...was what I thought seeing the NCN 57 sign outside Blackwells in Oxford (aren't I good? I went past Blackwells and didn't buy anything).

It goes to Chesham - to be precise, Chesham Underground station. Along the way there are some smashing traffic-free sections (such as the 'Phoenix Trail' railway track from Thame to Princes Risborough), some very tempting pubs, and as usual, some infeasibly steep hills. The one out of Great Missenden is one of only two on the NCN where I've had to get off and push - the other being the awesome climb out of Aberllefenni on Lon Las Cymru.

Along the way, there were two bent-round direction signs to right, and only one or two other places where the signage wasn't clear (mostly in Oxford, to be honest), which is quite good by usual NCN standards.

Obviously, having got to Chesham, I had to get back somehow: and (hoorah) it's Saturday, which means Rail Replacement Bus fun. So I cycled back (not on the NCN this time) to Haddenham, caught a train to Bicester, and then managed another five miles or so before dying and phoning Anna for a lift home.

Total 62 miles of tracks, which I might even map once the API wakes up.

Incidentally, Thame is rubbish for a lunch break. The fabulous butcher selling fabulous-looking steak, ale and Stilton pies won't heat them up; and the seemingly innocent Coronation chicken sandwich from the little bakery is now wreaking peculiar forms of vengeance on my digestive system.

The latest version of the OpenStreetMap software (API 0.5) is coming very soon - maybe as soon as a week and a half. There are two big changes, one of which requires action now.

Segments are being abolished. When the switchover happens, any segments which aren't already part of ways will each be turned into an individual way.

This affects you if you have drawn roads with segments (using JOSM) but not yet turned them into ways. A road which you have drawn with 20 segments, for example, will become 20 individual ways.

Before this happens, you should consider turning such 'runs of segments' into ways - making them easier to edit in the future.

== How to do this ==

In JOSM: use the TWays plugin, or do it manually

In Potlatch: enable unwayed segment display (on the prefs), then move to a corner on the pink lines, and press 'U' (details)

== Where to concentrate your efforts ==

Check your local area; check anywhere you're editing; and if you have some spare time, concentrate on one of the "hotspots" where there are many such unwayed segments.

Holy monkey, quadtiling has made a difference. I've never known the server respond so quickly.

Yay, another new Potlatch!

The big change is when you access Potlatch by clicking 'edit' next to a GPS trace. Potlatch will now import the GPS trace ready for you, so you don't have to keep clicking the GPS button to see it. (Of course, you can still click the button to see other traces - your original trace will continue to be displayed.)

The catch in this is that it will only work with traces that haven't been compressed (gzip, bz2, or whatever). So it won't work if you've uploaded it as a .gz; and it won't work for old traces, because they get gzipped anyway to save space. I'm thinking about how to fix that.

There'll be more funky GPS stuff in the future, but that's for another time.

The little change (but one I think might be quite popular :) ) is that I fixed the tabbing order on keys and values. Plus, hopefully, the disappearing-elastic-band-when-panning issue should be fixed.

You can now enter points of interest (POIs) in Potlatch - i.e. single nodes not connected to a way. These are good for towns, post boxes, peaks, pubs, etc. etc.

Just double-click to drop a point, then edit it exactly like you would a way.

Just come back from a week's (very enjoyable, if wet) cycling around Brittany: roughly, St Malo-Dinard-Cap Frehel-Plancoet-Dinan-Combourg-Fougeres-Antrain-Pontorson-Mont St Michel-Dol de Bretagne-Cancale-St Malo.

It's going to take a while to map, even given that I didn't note down street names, just road numbers. But much of Brittany's a blank canvas on OSM at the moment, and it's rather fun drawing a line through "unknown territory" like that - it's been a long time since I've been able to do that in the Cotswolds!

Have stumbled across the Potlatch "start new way from end of old way" bug again, and there seems to be another one if (somehow) you manage to click the end of a way twice in such a fashion that it doesn't register as a double-click. And I'm still unsure what I should do next: POIs? undo? all-singing, all-dancing new tag-editing panel?

From http://openstreetmap.gryph.de/count.txt:

971622x created_by

601101x =JOSM

130340x =almien_coastlines

107230x =Potlatch alpha

Ulp.

Andy Allan's Mapnik map of the National Cycle Network (woo, Googlejuice) is pure genius and the best example yet of why mashups suck, and cartography matters.

It's inspired me to start mapping some of the NCN routes I've cycled, with GPS, over the last couple of years. This has also been made possible by Potlatch's new magic 'U' key, which converts unwayed segments that someone has "helpfully" drawn very approximately along the line of my GPS tracks, into a nice editable way.

So I've recently drawn the Pembrokeshire/Carmarthenshire circuit on routes 4 and 47, and a couple of others that don't show up on the map yet. I've got tracks for much more of routes 4 and 5 to work on, and went out last night to get the missing bit in route 54 from Burton to Alrewas. The truly splendid route 8 - Lon Las Cymru - I cycled without GPS (shame) and will have to be an NPE job. Which means I'll have to remember how to use JOSM. Eek.

A few little improvements to Potlatch, mostly triggered by my own experiences using it over the past couple of weeks.

First of all, when you shift-click to add a point into a way, you can now drag the point at the same time. Really useful if you're taking a rough way and making it higher resolution.

There's a "force reupload" button for those occasions when the server isn't responding and you can't get rid of those negative ids. Just press 'F'.

And, finally, you can now convert a way of unwayed segments into a way, so you needn't stop editing when you see the dreaded pink lines. Get the unwayed segments on-screen (use the options dialogue, then click the GPS tracks button). Move to a vertex on the pink line. Then press 'U'. A way will be created extending in either direction, until there's a junction, or a change in segment direction (eventually, I'd like it to automatically reorder segments, too).

I don't really like having functionality solely hidden behind a keypress and plan to make the latter two more accessible in time, but it's a start.

'Undo' next, maybe?

If a way hasn't uploaded (i.e. negative id), but the '!' icon isn't showing up... unplug your network cable (or turn your wifi off). The '!' icon will appear, either immediately or when you pan the map. Reconnect, click the icon, and upload.

I should probably fix that more elegantly.

Currently working on:

- POI editing (i.e. nodes outside ways)
- a bit of a SQL speedup
- conversion facility for unwayed segments
- various UI changes
- removing Ming dependency for GPS tracks

Update later this week, hopefully.

The latest svn commit now has 'read-only' Potlatch (yes, I know how useful a read-only editor is!). Hopefully this'll be deployed soon.

As yet I'm simply porting the current Ruby SQL across as is. In time maybe it can be rewritten with real shiny Rails objects and the like when we've got a better idea of optimising performance.

More to follow.

Live from the Oxford dev day.