Boone Trace from James Boone Gravesite Marker to Fort Boonesboro

We’ve been working for a client developing a Boone Trace map and guide requiring maps at a few different scales. One scale is the “big picture” map and we selected a 3D basemap for this overview, letter-sized map. I spent only a few hours labeling the map, but with a little more work, I think it will look good. The color intensity might need to be reduced, if it’s decided to use the 3D map. It be more appropriate to make a simple line drawing map, in a nod to older map markers and the historic nature of the subject.

Interactive map legend

Many more hours were used to develop the driving tour basemap. Bringing in Kentucky state GIS data, the map was developed and labeled with shapefiles in TileMill. The idea is to build a good basemap for the client using online proofing and updating. After the production format and scale are chosen, we’ll create bounding boxes and clip out the print pages. TileMill styling and label placement can easily be transferred to Illustrator and with the goal of quickly designing a final proof.

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Ending a busy Saturday.

What an awesome weekend! We want to sincerely thank all of our friends, new and old, who came by our booth to talk about their adventures and uses of maps. We couldn’t have been happier after a busy day’s work with the excitement folks still have for good ‘ol paper maps. It’s inspiration that fuels our tanks. The weather held, this year’s food and beverage selection was superior, and our neighbors were fantastic. That’s why we say awesome!

One visitor, Emmett, epitomizes our type of person who loves maps and loves to use them. He recently moved to Lexington and committed himself to hiking all the official trails in the Red River Gorge. As he was outfitting his gear at Lexington’s Benchmark outdoor store, he came across one of our publications.

John at command/control in 2005, our first year at the church.

After a few dozen miles of using our map in the backcountry, he said, “That map was the best $15 I ever spent, hands down.” After he hikes all the trails, he’ll mount and frame his maps. Emmett, we’re gonna hold you to your pledge to send us a photograph of the framed map set.

This was our eight year at the same spot in the Woodland Christian Church fair annex. While we perhaps don’t have the same number of visitors as the Woodland Park grounds, we love our shady corner at the bottom of the hill.

We hope to see you next year and thanks for all your support!

Online map for shared-use trails and bike lanes

A new Bike Lexington map was released in June 2013. We developed a Tilemill online map version and it is online here. I have two directions we would like to go with this map. One, I’d like to establish legibility at all zoom levels so it can work on mobile devices. Two, I want to develop a version where users can submit reports on important or problematic locations with a focus on safety. It would be obvious to first map accidents and fatalities to communicate and understand how they happen.

We welcome any recommendations or contributions.

Sheltowee Trace trail with mile markers and landuse background image. First draft.

As we update the Sheltowee Trace maps, I took a diversion and looked at Tilemill from the folks at MapBox to create an interactive online map of the new alignment. Tilemill is pretty awesome app and allows you create a projects using a variety of spatial data, including Shapefiles, GeoTIFFs and GeoJSON (a new format to me, but shows some interesting possibilities).

The strength of Tilemill centers on few features; you can style layers in markup very similar to CSS, attribute data can be used for styling and interactively shown on the published map, attributes and features can be displayed differently at different zoom levels, and you publish to an MBtile file, a SQlite database. This format contains many thousands, no millions, of raster tiles that are served quite fast in your browser. In my opinion, a ton of creativity can be found in this free app.

For the Sheltowee Trace map, I pulled in a GeoTIFF of landuse with elevation hillshading, the ST trail with mile markers, and polygons of county and larger towns. After tinkering with the style sheets, I made a fairly simple map. I wanted to add so many more layers, but I had to see how it looked online. The simplest way to publish it to use MapBox’s service, but the .mbtiles file was 300 MB and I wanted to host on SheltoweeTrace.com. I needed to to use a few javascript libraries to serve this map on our server. I chose Leaflet through MapBox’s Wax library (inspired by this post) and it was fairly easy to setup. One thing I learned after a little frustration, the newest version of Leaflet.js will not work with the .js files in Wax. Use only the files included in Wax and it will work perfectly. The only other bit of code needed is something to read the data in the mbtiles file and format it properly for Wax. I used tileserver.php and it is important link if you want to display attribute data interactively.

While the map is very simple, it has some potential I think. Obviously the base map needs finishing with a good legend, but some exciting options include adding popup photos of significant trail features (with the future hope make this an interactive submission for users) and using Leaflet’s geolocation feature for mobile devices (pretty buggy now and there’s issue of offlining the data for use in the field).

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After you submit your artwork, we will give you a draft to edit or accept for publishing. You will also see and confirm the ad before the ad is printed.

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As we update the site for our 2013 hiking season, please don’t mind our fuss, too much. We’re trying organize our site better and offer more maps for spring.

We submitted the Bike Lex Map for the Kentucky Association of Mapping Professionals 2012 Kentucky GIS Conference map competition. We competed and won 2nd place! It was a great conference in Louisville and I must say that I probably gained a few pounds from all of the great food.

We invite you to visit our booth during the Woodland Art Fair this weekend, August 18-19. We are located in the back section of the Woodland Christian Church portion of the fair.

Click on map to expand

This year we have friends for neighbors, Cricket Press. They were near High Street for many years, but decided to join us in the tree covered corner of the fair. They design and handprint all kinds of awesomeness.

This map shows our locations with bike lanes (blue lines) and preferred bike routes (orange lines) to help cyclists navigate this car crazy event. Bluegrass Community & Technical College is offering bike valet parking this year.