over time open street maps got better and better; i started to rely on them more than on google maps when hiking around – osm gave me more detailed maps of hiking trails in Barcelona and Singapore, Las Palmas and Slovenia. i wanted to share some of the interesting paths here; the best i could find was [now defunct] http://maps.cloudmade.com. they allowed creation of urls pointing directly to specific part of the map with route based on waypoints defined by me. it was not perfect but it worked. unfortunately cloudmade pulled the plug on that service – links got broken. the alternative i’ve found:
- use WP-GPX-Maps to embed OSM-based maps with custom made gpx traces
- i’m too lazy to turn on gpx recording on my phone every time i go out for a walk but i had waypoints defined for the old tracks include in the cloudmade urls; i’ve used another website that can generate routing information based on waypoints: openrouteservice.org, earlier yournavigation.org. it’s not exactly “production quality”, but it does the trick and produces gpx file with route path, there’s also graphhopper.com/maps/
- i’ve used Viking GPS data editor to adjust gpx’es and uploaded them to my wordpress
- for some routes i’ve used GMapToGPX to generate gpx file from google maps routing info
- gpsvisualizer for hand-drawing some of the gpx routes
- gpx merging tool
yes.. it takes more clicks but the result is not-so-bad and i’m not so dependent on a single maps/routing provider; WP-GPX-Maps can use map-tails from many providers and routes are already stored on my server in gpx files.
ps on the phone i use osmand~.