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Hill maps changes

Hill maps changes


Postby Paul Webster » Thu May 03, 2018 12:07 pm

Google Maps have just announced they are bringing in new pricing for displaying their maps on websites like Walkhighlands. The result of this was going to be that we'd have a new bill of around £4,000 per month to display google maps on Walkhighlands in the way we currently do.

To prevent this, we're changing many of the google maps on the site to instead use our own map server.

I've switched the small maps on the Munro hill pages to use our map server already; other pages will switch to this format as I rewrite the code.

Hopefully the new maps on these pages might be seen as better than the old google ones.
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby prog99 » Thu May 03, 2018 7:01 pm

Hi Paul, a site I look after got stung by this too. I've moved over to open streetmap and the leaflet api which with our simple needs was a straightforward port and took less than an hour.

A lot of unhappy developers out there.
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Paul Webster » Thu May 03, 2018 8:45 pm

Ah, fun isn't it! OpenStreetMap don't allow use of their tile server in any production system or site - we'd be banned pretty fast if we tried to use it, with nearly a million monthly api calls. I think our own tile server is the only option. What makes it complicated is that the tiles are projected to the OS projection, which means alot more code changes for each type of map we use (unfortunately we've too many different features!)

At least we do have a map server, which makes it feasible to keep having the maps.
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby iangpark » Mon May 07, 2018 8:21 pm

Must say I am loving the new look Paul! Keeps the necessities unchanged which is what matters most. Know next to nothing about how free-source mapping works but it sounds expensive :shock:
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Pointless Parasite » Mon May 07, 2018 9:35 pm

The heights of the Wainwrights on the map are showing up with the wrong units when clicked on (m instead of feet), making them all look huge.
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Paul Webster » Tue May 08, 2018 8:55 am

iangpark wrote:Must say I am loving the new look Paul! Keeps the necessities unchanged which is what matters most.


Thanks - well on with this work now. Some of the pages are much enhanced - especially the page accessible from the walks pages and area pages where you can browse all the walks on the map. Walks starting from the same point are now dealt with much better. The walk search results are better too.

Pointless Parasite wrote:The heights of the Wainwrights on the map are showing up with the wrong units when clicked on (m instead of feet), making them all look huge.


Whoops - I forget about that every time when doing updates, should be fixed now. Always feared Wainwright would turn in his grave if we put his hills were in metres.
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby nigheandonn » Tue May 08, 2018 2:51 pm

Something has gone a bit funny with the Hewitts on the All Hills map - if they're also Wainwrights (or Donalds), they have two pins.

Donalds which are also Corbetts or Grahams are fine, just to make it odder!
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Paul Webster » Tue May 08, 2018 4:05 pm

Hi there, it's always displayed two on that map, it's just that they were in exactly the same place so you couldn't tell :D

I've been putting in fixes to the way the icon is shown compared to its coordinates, as a few people have noticed that the icons were a bit off and appeared to move slightly as you zoom the map. I think that you've got the fixed version in your cache for one list (e.g. Wainwrights) and the off-located version for the other (e.g. Hewitts) and so you are seeing both. As the cache clears up all the lists should be in the fixed locations, so it should be OK for you in a while.
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby nigheandonn » Tue May 08, 2018 4:43 pm

Cunning :)

They've currently got even further apart, so that I can click on both separately, but we'll see what happens next!

I am getting the pins shifting as I zoom, but only in the sense that the pins are zooming before the map does - it catches up with them afterwards.

Thanks
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Paul Webster » Tue May 08, 2018 4:49 pm

The cacheing is a bit of a pain - the hills on those maps (and the hill pages) are cached per user (so they can be a different colour if you've climbed them) in a kml file on the server. This means you can look at lots of hill pages without it having to re-requesting your coloured hill icon data from the database for each one. Additionally the kml files then get cached in your browser and don't refresh even if you press refresh (depending on your browser).

If I try a completely new browser I've not used before then everything looks fine with all the hill icon positions on all the pages I think... so fingers crossed (all of them use the same code now and so should eventually be in same position).
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Chris Mac » Thu May 10, 2018 11:28 am

The new changes are great Paul, it makes a big difference and has also fixed the incorrect placements of summits on the all hills map.

No more ctrl+ scroll or right click and scroll to zoom, really liking the image displaying when a hill is clicked on and having a proper os 1:50k scale map show when zommed in is so much better than google physical, top work cheers! :clap:
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby LeithySuburbs » Thu May 10, 2018 12:08 pm

Chris Mac wrote:No more ctrl+ scroll or right click and scroll to zoom, really liking the image displaying when a hill is clicked on and having a proper os 1:50k scale map show when zommed in is so much better than google physical, top work cheers! :clap:

this
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Chris Mac » Thu May 10, 2018 12:20 pm

Hi Paul,

When viewing the Munro's map, the drop down menu sits behind the map but for the other hills it sits in front, just so you know.

Cheers,

Chris
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Paul Webster » Thu May 10, 2018 1:00 pm

Thanks Chris, should be OK now.

And thanks for the supportive comments. Incidentally, it's not a 1:50k OS map really, it's the Walkhighlands Inc. Open Source similar map to an OS 1:50k :)
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Re: Hill maps changes

Postby Chris Mac » Thu May 17, 2018 6:21 pm

Paul Webster wrote:Thanks Chris, should be OK now.

And thanks for the supportive comments. Incidentally, it's not a 1:50k OS map really, it's the Walkhighlands Inc. Open Source similar map to an OS 1:50k :)

Thanks Paul, i've spotted another bug - when you first view the all hills map the summits are not in the correct place and zooming in shows this in more detail. However, if you have viewed any of the individual hill maps such as Munros or Corbetts first, then view the all hills map, it works fine.... :crazy:
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