Shortly after getting out of the Hospital I fell. I went down hard. It was embarrassing. Probably the worst thing is it took two people to help get me up. One person was pulling me up towards the left and one person was pulling me forward…which wasn’t helping my balance at all. I got up. I lived. I slowed down. Haven’t fallen since.
A couple of years ago I did the “Learn 12 new things” tech tour. I dove into all sorts of things from leaflet to python to an rpm based Linux Distro (that I’m still running – Fedora) to Openlayers…I forget how many things I tried. It was somewhere near 11 or 10 – Didn’t make twelve though. I also learned that I don’t understand most programming tutorials. I’m not a programmer.
I started or technically restarted mapping bike lanes in town in OpenStreetMap (https://northrivergeo.github.io/bikeanooga/):
The best thing I did was call it “Bikeanooga” since I’m in Chattanooga. I made a github repo here: https://github.com/northrivergeo/bikeanooga and then walked away from it for about a year or more. I’ve had more emails and phone calls on that one thing than I have anything else I’ve done. In OpenStreetMap it’s a mashup of 12 years worth of mapping. Some lanes are right. Some lanes were speculative as in “Oh the city is about to make this a bike lane” and they never did. Some are just wrong. Some are right but with inconsistent tagging. So I’ve started a cleanup and an update to the map. I started doing this 2 years ago but just drifted away from the process.
My plan is at the moment (until I get a better understanding of github actions) to update it once a month. During that month I make notes and if I’m in the area I’ll check out to see if the bike lane exists. On my linux box I run one script and it grabs the data from OSM using Overpass and converts it to Geojson using GDAL. I check it then push it up to the repo. Then into Leaflet. I gotta add popups next.
Back in my “learn more tech” phase – I found that in Leaflet you can “fetch” or use “Jquery” to add data. So the Firehydrant map I’ve been making uses JQuery. There has to be something easier for me to understand so I used “fetch” this go around. It may sound like at this point I know what I’m doing but at best I’m following tutorials and doing a lot of copy and pasting and internet searches.
What I learned is my simple search for Leaflet Tutorials produced a pile of results. Results basically fell into three categories:
- You’re here because you’re a programmer so I’m going to skip the basics and dive right in.
- You’re here because you want to make a simple point layer so we’re going to hand type out the geojson and load it.
- I’ve copied this tutorial from another tutorial which didn’t quite work right to begin with. Please Like and Subscribe.
I’m not a programmer. What I want to do isn’t super simple. I’d really like a better tutorial for “GIS People who have a Geojson File”. Two years ago I became frustrated enough to just feel back to QGIS2Web and made the map that way. It’s easier. I still wanted to learn how leaflet worked because I want to toss stuff up on the web occasionally. Learning new things is fun again. Mostly. Maybe I’ll eventually make a tutorial once I understand what to do.
So why tell you the first part? I sorta feel like I fell last weekend and had people pulling me right and left and backwards. I picked up enough to get it working from some Github examples though. I’m slightly more confident in what I want to do and how to get it done. Of course now that I’ve started pulling the bike lanes together I need to put in bike parking. I probably need to add Bike Rental Stations. If I do all that might as well add Bike stores. Who knows when it will get done. It will give me something to do if I ever get bored.
As part of my rehab workout – Maybe I pick a route and ride it from start to finish now that I feel like doing that very thing.
