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Saturday, September 7, 2013
http://wikimapping.net/wikimap/explore/s-27

Jessica and Kate were inside on such a beautiful day. Sandi was at work, and I had to get us out of the house. The girls were NOT keen on biking across Delaware, which is about 14 miles. I decided we’d bike the Michael Castle Trail, which I didn’t know was the Michael Castle Trail until after the ride. I saw the name at the newly installed kiosk. We biked around 12 miles, but it wasn’t a contest and there wasn’t much to break up the ride except for the marina.

The trail is pretty recently paved, and nobody has really mapped it yet for the public (as far as I know). We biked from a parking lot off of Clinton St/Cox Neck Rd. I noted the turn-off on the map. We saw walkers, a family picnicking, and a couple of dads riding with their kids as we biked to the marina at the western end of the trail.

The C&D canal had boats always somewhere in site. Mostly recreation powerboats, and a couple of sail boats.

I suppose the trail could continue past Lums Pond, but we didn’t go further. At the marina there’s a shop that sells bottled drinks. They had just had a pig roast, and Jessica commented on the pig’s roasted head lay on the table. Live music played in the distance. A woman with neon running shoes offered us free drinks left over from the barbecue.

The bike ride back to our start had a tailwind and was much quicker. Kate rode on the trailer bike because I hadn’t known what to expect. She’s way too strong for the trailer bike, and I think we’re done with it. She’s too big for her starter bike. I’m trying to encourage her to ride Jessica’s larger bike, which is has wheels slightly smaller than a mountain bike and plenty of gears.

Bringing kids on an hour plus drive to a bike trail required some electronic devices to play with in the car They like the nook, which is far less expensive than an iPad and works well. On the way home, we got a little ice cream at Wawa. I don’t think they had a great time because of the heat. They didn’t have a bad time though.

We are updating a map of Northeastern Pennsylvania for the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.  This week I decided to change the projection from State Plane NAD83 to WGS Pseudo Mercator. This will let me use MAPublisher’s Web Tile Exporter so that I can place a map identical to the printed map directly over a google, bing or OSM map base.

Here is a rough screenshot, where the left side of the image is a custom graphic, and the right half is a Bing map:

My expectation is that when someone zooms in more, they will get only our custom trail data presented over the base map, which will be in either google, OSM or Bing.

Here’s another very rough live example of some lines from the upcoming East Coast Greenway Guide incorporated into the open street map. The dialog box and red dashed lines are part of the map graphic, not an overlay.  By using transparency, you can zoom in to a pretty detailed level and use the base layer data combined with the raster image.

By changing the projection but still developing the map in MAPublisher, a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator, I’m able to create these map tiles that will look great on client websites using map tiles even as we publish a printed map.

At some point, my hope is to incorporate my custom maps into WikiMapping projects for greater customization and feedback from people.